http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/381/48823beardragon.jpgIn Africa, the Russian state seems far more ‘upfront’ about pursuing its grand geopolitical projects than the more cautious and patient Chinese. Russia’s private sector too is prepared on occasion to operate with an unashamed directness where others might be more diplomatic." While all eyes are on China's growing influence in Africa, Stephen Marks argues that Russia's Russia's bear is quitely intensifying its hug.
====While all eyes have been focussed on China’s rise in Africa, the other former Cold War Communist giant has also been making a comeback. And at first glance there are obvious parallels between the dragon and the bear, as each seeks to rebuild its African links on a commercial basis while building where it can on the friends and contacts made in an earlier, more ideological era.
Today the Aswan dam stands as a monument to Soviet aid in the Cold War era, as the Tazara railway does to China’s role. And the thousands of Soviet graduates match the specialists trained in China.
But Russia’s recent rise in African trade though steep, is far from matching China’s. The fall from $2.7bn in 1994 to just over $900m in 1994 (only 1.5% of all Russia’s non-CIS trade) has been followed by a climb back to over £3bn in 2006, with a further leap to $6bn in 2007. (See also www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~chegeo)
But this is easily dwarfed by China’s trade volume, already at $40m in the first nine months of 2007 alone, and projected to soar to $100m by 2010.
Nonetheless the trappings of Russia’s African rise seem at first glance to mimic those of China, if on a smaller scale. In September 2006, just weeks before the FOCAC summit in Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin took 100 Russian businessmen - some of them top ‘oligarchs’ - on a five-day whirlwind trip to Morocco and South Africa, followed up in March 2007 by then-Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov taking more business chiefs and officials to Angola, Namibia and South Africa.
As with Chinese President Hu Jintao’s whirlwind African trips, there were reports of major deals, promising investments in mining, energy and even space exploration. And Russia has also stepped up to the mark with the right noises about development and debt relief.
This April, at the first joint meeting of the AU and the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Russia’s ambassador to Ethiopia announced a $500m development assistance package and a $20m contribution to the World Bank’s African anti-malaria programme.
And Russia has also written off $20bn of African debt, making its contribution to the Debt relief Initiative for HIPCs the biggest of all donors in share of GDP, and the third biggest in absolute value.
A more detailed look at the deals done by the business chiefs accompanying Russia’s leaders on these jaunts shows some apparent similarities, but also significant underlying differences when compared to the pattern of China’s intervention.
As with China, energy and raw materials deals are a prominent part of the Russian roadshow. As production-sharing agreement with its Nigerian owners, followed by taking a 56.66% stake in three prospecting projects in the Ivory Coast and Ghana from the U.S. company Vanco Energy.
Mr Vekselberg appears to be a key figure in Russian-South African trade relations. He was appointed by President Mbeki to his International Investment Council. He also heads the foreign relations committee of Russia’s Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, and is said to be known as ‘Mr South Africa’ in Russia and ‘Mr Russia’ in South Africa. As we shall see he has been in the news for other reasons too.
Putin’s original 2006 visit took in only Morocco and South Africa, leading to the criticism that he was leaving out the expanse of black Africa in between. But since then the gap has been at least partly filled, not only by oil deals in West Africa, but also by Russia’s financial sector. In Luanda Angola’s first foreign-controlled bank has opened, owned 66% by Russia’s foreign trade bank Vneshtorgbank.
Russia’s Renaissance Capital group now owns 25% of Ecobank, the Nigerian bank which claims 450 branches in 22 countries. And the Renaissance group is also launching a $1bn African investment fund.
There has also been a Russian-South African tie-up between the world’s two largest diamond producers De Beers and Alrosa, the largely state-owned Russian producer. The two signed a joint exploration agreement a joint exploration agreement to facilitate De Beers exploration in Russia which is said to have reserves potentially greater than Botswana’s. This followed an EU anti-trust ruling barring De Beers from buying diamonds direct from Alrosa.
But diamonds apart, there is one significant difference between this Russian interest in energy and raw materials and its larger and more publicised Chinese comparator. While a major Chinese motive is the need for raw materials to fuel and feed China’s soaring output, Russia is a major raw materials exporter. Indeed it is rising world raw material prices, partly fed by China’s growing demand, which provides Russia with the cash resources to fund its purchases of African and global assets.
As Newsweek put it: ‘Russia is the world's largest energy exporter, and has plenty of its own metals and minerals. But rich Russian companies want to extend their global reach while they have the money, and with oil approaching $100 a barrel in recent weeks [sic], the time is now. There's another motive, too, analysts say: moving empires beyond the reach of the Kremlin serves as insurance against future political changes in Russia’.
As a result, the detailed articulation of the relationship between the state and its geopolitical strategy, and the commercial interests of private capital are arguably different in the Russian and Chinese cases, though it may not be immediately clear how the difference should be characterised.
In energy for example, Russia’s position as a net exporter enables the state to use its energy strategy as a geopolitical tool. While Russia is said to be running short of gas, this is partly due to the need to meet its considerable export commitments. Russia has been accused of attempting to use German and Ukrainian dependence on Russian gas as a means of political leverage. And at least one Russian analyst sees recent trends in Algerian policy as a reflection of Western fears of a Russian-Algerian energy tie-up being used in the same way.
Thus the Novosti News Agency reported in December 2007:
“Algeria has joined the global fight for diversification of energy supplies... According to Andrei Maslov, director of Rosafroexpertiza, a Russian expert group on Africa, his view stems from news on the expiry of a memorandum of understanding, which Algeria's Sonatrach state oil and gas corporation and Russia's gas monopoly Gazprom signed in August 2006.
“Algeria earlier leaked that it was not satisfied with the quality of Russian military equipment. Surprisingly, the criticism came not from direct clients in the Algerian armed forces, but the civilian team of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
“The Russian expert sees a connection between the two incidents, especially if you take into account the high price of the question of Russian-Algerian strategic partnership. He writes that the two countries could jointly control up to 40% of gas supplies to the European Union. But Europe has opted for Algeria and Libya in an attempt to neutralize the growing influence of Gazprom.
“Europe's vigorous efforts to diversify supply routes have made Gazprom's presence in the two countries unacceptable to end gas consumers. The United States is also concerned … Maslov writes that the end of hostilities in Algeria and growing oil and gas export revenues led to a lightning transfer of political influence from the army elite to the energy lobby. President Bouteflika, who had maintained a neutral stance for several years, took the side of the energy lobby - and received a pat on the back from his Western patrons, primarily the United States.
“The redivision of power affected Algeria's relationship with Russia, especially their military-technical cooperation. The Algerian army and law-enforcement and security bodies were pushed away from the economy, and also from domestic and foreign policy. Until recently, Russia's policy in Algeria was based on confidential relations with the most influential military and security groups, who have now been pushed aside. Therefore, the Kremlin cannot hope for any good news from the Algerian front soon, Maslov concludes.”
But if so, Russia is fighting back. According to ‘Africa Report’ Putin in his recent visit to Libya concluded a $4.5bn debt cancellation and arms sales package combined with ‘a raft of new oil and gas deals...the details of which have yet to be spelled out, and a partnership with the National Oil Corporation of Libya to produce, transport and sell oil and gas. This follows an agreement between Russia’s Gazprom and Italy’s ENI to work together in “third countries”.This in its turn is said to be connected with plans for a gas pipeline between Libya and Sicily able to carry 8bn cubic metres of gas a year.
There is also talk of a grand $13bn trans-Sahara gas pipeline from the Niger Delta to the Algerian coast and thence to Europe [1]. While some experts consider this ‘politically and technically impractical’, the majority state-owned Gazprom’s Chief Executive is said to be in continuing discussions with officials from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC).
Whatever may become of these particular initiatives, the Russian state seems far more ‘upfront’ about pursuing its grand geopolitical projects than the more cautious and patient Chinese. Russia’s private sector too is prepared on occasion to operate with an unashamed directness where others might be more diplomatic.
Mark Buzuk, Africa Projects Manager for Vekselberg’s Renova Group, has the writers tell the reader that “this is the story of how the government, through the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME), awarded prospecting rights to a consortium set to benefit both Vekselberg, one of Russia's infamous oligarchs, and Chancellor House, the company we reveal to be an ANC business front.
The story is important because it suggests that the government was swayed by a mix of diplomatic expediency -- it was keen to improve economic relations with Russia in tandem with growing ties of friendship -- and the ruling party's funding needs.”
The article goes on to show that Renova’s BEE [Black Economic Empowerment] partner in the Kalahari deal was Chancellor House, an investment company used as a funding front by the ruling ANC.
It charges that ‘The African National Congress's (ANC) Chancellor House group has targeted investments in sectors of the economy where government institutions dish out opportunities such as business rights or contracts. When companies in which Chancellor holds a share compete for such opportunities, the ruling party becomes both player and referee’.
The journalists also documented outstanding racketeering charges against Vekselberg in the US courts relating to the process by which he acquired control of his companies in the first place.
Those involved in the negotiations leading to the Kalahari deal have denied any wrongdoing, as has the management of Chancellor House. But since the change of leadership at the ANC’s Polokwane Conference last December, the newly elected leadership has ordered a forensic audit of all empowerment deals and tenders that were received by Chancellor House.
Cynics may claim that these decisions are more a reflection of factional score-settling within the ANC than a sign of any new leaves being turned. Presumably Mr Vekselberg will be among those awaiting the outcome.
[1] ‘Moscow grabs at Big Oil’s prize assets’, The Africa Report June-July 2008.
*Stephen Marks is a research associate with Fahamu
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governancehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/381/48822egyptfree.jpg“When the Egyptian people speak out against poverty and an inert government, human rights abuses follow.” Mustafa Adam-Noble looks at the various ways that suppression in Egypt is growing.
====Ever since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Egypt has been governed under Emergency Law: 27 years worth of “emergencies” constitutionally designated for use only when facing a direct threat, such as a military invasion or a natural disaster. The law, which is supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances, has become the permanent method of governance in Egypt. Interestingly, President Hosni Mubarak has been the country’s ruler for all those 27 years.
Having survived several assassination attempts, it is perhaps no surprise that Mubarak has been reluctant to govern with normal laws. However, hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned during his rule, with 18,000 still held. The regime’s style of law enforcement constitutes jailing large groups of “suspects” in the hope that someone amongst the prisoners will be culpable. Under the rule of Emergency Law, anyone can be arrested without charge or evidence against them.
Alexander Weissink, a Radio Netherlands journalist with a specialty in Egyptian affairs, interviewed Mahmoud Qutri, an ex-Egyptian police colonel and author of books on Egyptian constabulary abuses. Qutri stated: “The police has tried for 27 years to work with a carte blanche. Outside of the state of emergency they would suddenly find themselves obliged to do real investigative work to find evidence, instead of rounding up suspects and use violence to force confessions out of them...That is about the last thing they want.”
A recent survey has found that Egypt’s government workforce of 6 million spends an average of just 27 minutes a day working. In addition to a malign vacuum of legal procedure, the absence of a government work ethic further sidelines the course of justice throughout the country’s population of 75 million.
Since the assassination of Sadat by al-Gama’a al-Islamya (the Islamic Group), the government has locked up 50,000 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood despite the lack of direct links between the Brotherhood and al-Gama’a. The Muslim Brotherhood has a far less violent ideology, and Al-Gama’a was in fact formed after the Brotherhood “renounced violence” in the 1970s. Al-Gama’a was behind the 1997 Luxor attacks in Egypt that killed 62 civilians, most of whom were tourists.
The crackdown on the two Islamic groups by President Mubarak has been brutal and far-reaching. Amid the unjust sweeping arrests, some attacks were probably prevented. However, the lack of accurate, evidence-based police action caused the imprisonment of thousands of people; the majority of whom were innocent and some of whom were tortured.
Human rights organisations continue to condemn the abuse and suppression of the Egyptian people.
During his 2005 electoral campaign, President Mubarak promised to stop the imprisonment of members of the press. In 2007, he jailed eleven journalists for “insulting” him and his party.
Also in 2005, Mubarak vowed to finally end the state of emergency. On 26th May 2008, he issued a verdict extending Emergency Law for yet another 2 years.
During the same elections, police blocked voters from casting their ballots for the Muslim Brotherhood - the only feasible opposition to the current regime. With poignant determination, some voters were forced to enter a polling station through its back window using a ladder, in defiance of police station closures.
Prime minister Ahmed Nazif summarised the superficial self-promotion of debunked government policy, stating: “The storm of terrorism blows strong around us and our enemies lie in wait.” Such poetic rhetoric of fear has become the justification for a farcical legal system and endemic human rights abuses.
Recently, on the 9th of June, eight thousand Egyptians protested against the government’s decision to end flour rations. Eighty-seven have been arrested so far.
Many similar protests occurred in 2007 and 2008, centring around the massive and rapid rise in the cost of living in Egypt (a 50% increase according to the latest count, with inflation at 20%). Further, millions of Egyptian workers do not have job contracts or social insurance; meaning that they have no rights to minimum wage, holidays, or compensation for job injuries.
Forty percent of people live on less than $2 a day and doubling food prices have left almost half of the population undernourished. This is taking place while the Egyptian government receives nearly $2 billion in aid from the US; the highest recipient of its kind after Iraq and Israel. Egypt has also gained another $2 billion this year in revenues from the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest trade routes.
When the Egyptian people speak out against poverty and an inert government, human rights abuses follow.
The government has openly declared its intention to suppress free speech when it issued warnings that any other demonstrators will lose their jobs. More gravely, the threat of imprisonment and serious maltreatment is ever-present.
Mubarak and his government are also considering blocking Facebook after 80,000 young Egyptians were mobilised in April 2008, protesting rising food prices. A blogger and activist who helped organise the protest was recently released after being jailed and allegedly tortured.
Even amongst the seriously ill, the brutality of the regime is acutely demonstrated. Sufferers of HIV were arrested and chained to their hospital beds for months before an international outcry in February 2008 pressured the Ministry of Health to have them unchained.
In a display of hypocrisy, a gay man was arrested because of his sexual orientation in May 2001 and was subsequently raped by one of these guards. He was arrested along with 51 others before being set free following pressure from both the US and the EU. Two years later, the courts put the men on trial again and, this time, were able to pass down prison sentences.
The authorities have forcefully used their power over the legal system to fulfil their aims in other instances. According to Radio Netherlands, in February 2007 forty members of the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested on suspicion of terrorism. Civil courts repeatedly dismissed their case because of a lack of evidence. Mubarak intervened and transferred them to a military tribunal where they were condemned to serve sentences ranging from two to ten years.
In an interview with the Inter Press Service, Ayman Aqeel, head of the Cairo-based Maat Centre for Constitutional and Legal Rights, said: "Egypt doesn't need an emergency law or new anti-terror legislation," he said. "Proposed anti-terrorism laws will only represent another means of restricting our freedoms. Normal laws, and the penalties they carry, should be enough to deal with any crime."
Mubarak and his government must take a step back and look at the landscape that they both have created in Egyptian society.
Continued violations of basic human rights that attempt to break the spirit of the Egyptian people in order to fulfill a political agenda are shameful crimes.
Much needs to change before Egypt can progress beyond its current flailing state. The government must find a way to use incentives in their bureaucracy to both protect the public and prosecute real perpetrators. This can eventually help develop the country under normal laws and do away with the “state of emergency”.
The suppression of freedom of speech and the systematic abuse of prisoners throws the country into a vicious cycle that diminishes tolerance and progressive attitudes.
With economic realities worsening and the ability to survive becoming more difficult, Egyptians will continue to protest and it will become harder and harder for Mubarak to silence the masses.
?*Mustafa Adam-Noble is a political commentator.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Violence & Peace Egypthttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/381/48821ghana.jpgUnequal 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.
====The floods have gone. In September last year Northern Ghana briefly hit the head-lines with washed away bridges and destitute communities. Concerned citizens, benevolent donors and an opportunistic government responded with welcome relief. But now the situation has gone back to ‘normal’ and attention can go back to issues of national importance. As if the North is not part of the national agenda.
There is a natural reluctance to raise ‘the North’ as an issue. After all, is northern Ghana really so much disadvantaged compared to the rest of the country? Are the northerners the only poor people in Ghana? And is it not so that people from Northern Ghana are always complaining? Even if there is acceptance of a disadvantaged situation, this is then often accompanied by the thought that this is all rather inevitable. Considering the ecological conditions, the human resource base and the land-locked position, what is the economic potential of northern Ghana really?
In this article we argue, that there is a ‘special position’ of the North within Ghana. This has many and deep-rooted reasons. We think that to address this issue requires a deliberate effort. Not so much from international donors or civil society, but first and foremost from the government. What we have seen so far is not sufficient. There is a strong imperative for the national leadership to take note of the northern challenge. It is preposterous to think that middle income status can be achieved for Ghana by 2015 with the current pace of development in the North – more than one third of Ghana’s land mass and 20 per cent of the population!
The North – South divide in Ghana has gradually developed over time, and has become more marked and significant, even after Independence. If the slave trade affected all parts of present-day Ghana, northern Ghana was attacked from two sides by slave traders from the coast (trans-Atlantic) as well as from the hinterland (trans-Sahara) for export of slaves to America and the Arab world respectively. The Gate of No Return may create a vivid and strong symbolic image in the castles on the Coast, but for the Northerners there were so many more (and equally tortuous) slave routes to be whisked away on. The abolition of the slave trade did alleviate the situation, but did not stop the flow of human resources from the North.
Within the colonial administrative arrangements, the southern parts of Ghana became the Gold Coast Colony while the northern parts were administered separately as the Northern Territory. Granted that the developmental agenda of the British Empire in its formal colonies was rather limited, but for the Northern Territory it was entirely non-existent. The colonial government focused purely on ‘maintaining law and order’ and did not initiate any meaningful education in the North, even actively discouraging missionary efforts as from the White Fathers in Navrongo. Some secondary schools in the south are celebrating a 100 years of existence, and the University of the Gold Coast started in 1948, yet by the mid 1950s the entire North had six students in secondary school and one attending university. It is just a bit over 50 years ago that the first secondary school was established in Northern Region!
This educational discrimination served to preserve the status of the north as labour reserve for the mines and the plantations in the south. The only effective opportunities for economic advancement during the first half of the 20th Century for people from the North was migration. With no schooling and strong trading barriers, employment on the cocoa farms was often the only choice available.
The historical neglect is reinforced by ecological differences. Southern Ghana is humid and hot as part of the West African rainforest. Northern Ghana, in contrast, is part of the guinea zone, with less favourable conditions for agriculture. Not only does rainfall decrease the further north one travels in Ghana, but the rain is also concentrated in shorter periods with characteristic torrential rains. This leads to higher run-off, and coupled with soils poor in organic matter, crop production can only take place in one, often erratic, season. Yet, despite these more difficult conditions, many more households in northern Ghana are dependent on agriculture than in southern Ghana (72 % compared to 44 %). The land-locked nature of northern Ghana, linked to the Coast by one single road passing through the Kumasi metropole, severely limits alternative economic opportunities.
Independence did bring a change in the picture, but the differences between north and south in Ghana were not systematically addressed. To correct the historical imbalance and the ecological differences requires more than nation-wide policies and demands specific policy choices. The strong social policies of the Nkrumah era did boost education in the North, while the economic policies of the Acheampong regime brought some industrialisation (meat factory in Zuarungu, tomato factory in Pwalugu, groundnut factory in Bawku) and boosted commercial agriculture (rice and cotton). It was at that time that rice farms were so big that planes had to be used for spraying. Though these state-led policies did little to address the structural north-south divide, it did give Northern Ghana a chance to make a step ahead.
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.
Economic power goes hand in hand with political power. While the cocoa industry and the gold mines have traditionally been the basis for economic development in Ghana, it is no co-incidence that both are located in the south and that both have received favourable treatment, no matter the party or president in power. Mining may possibly have less potential in the North than in the South, but even that cannot be fully ascertained, as geological explorations in northern Ghana do not achieve the level of detail as the southern equivalents.
Even clearer is the discrimination when comparing the cocoa industry in the South to the shea industry in the North. The government since colonial time has heavily invested in the cocoa sector through research, extension, support to co-operatives and other farmer groups and investment in supporting infrastructure. Even in the market-driven environment of today the government retains a heavy regulatory hand in the cocoa industry.
Yet the shea industry, with similar economic potential, has been systematically neglected. No research, no extension, no investment in infrastructure, no regulation. The industry is left to the poverty-stricken women to collect a meagre income during lean times. Market agents then buy it opportunistically from the women at the time that they are looking for small cash in the ‘hunger season’ and hoard it till prices have risen. It ends up in the hands of a few multi-national companies. The fact that Ghana garnered over USD 1 billion in export from cocoa in 2006, compared to USD 30 million in export from shea is not just due to different economic potentials. It also demonstrates the effect of systematic policy neglect.
While economic policies have not favoured the North, government social interventions have done little to alleviate the situation. With 38 out of the 101 opposition members of Parliament coming from the North and the overall majority of northern MPs being in the opposition (38 out of 49), the government is not inclined to give the North favourable treatment in the allocation of resources. The paradox here is that continued neglect of ‘the Northern problem’ comes in the guise of ‘national policies’, not discriminating between Regions.
Economic policies are characterised by liberalisation and giving free reign to private actors. The private sector is the engine of growth. But the private sector will invest where conditions are most favourable. In the South the harbour is near; in the North it is at least one days’ drive away. In the South skilled and unskilled labour is available; in the North educational achievements are low. Infrastructure and climatic conditions are much better in the South than in the North. Probably the only advantage much of the North has (apart from the upper Regions) is abundance of land, but given the land tenure situation in Ghana and climatic conditions, that is difficult to translate in an economic gain. So, given the choice to invest in the South or in the North, which investor would indeed choose the North?
A similar logic bedevils social policies. 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! Just two districts in Brong Ahafo Region (Nkoranza and Atebubu) have an equal number of schools in the programme than the entire North (consisting of 34 districts)! One of those districts was the site of a parliamentary bye-election in 2006. In the struggle between political expedience and pro-poor policies, the former reigns supreme. With no political muscle to speak of, the North systematically looses out.
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.
It cannot be denied that northern Ghana has recorded considerable progress since independence. But the North on most of the social and economic indicators is still far behind the South. Only in a few instances is the gap narrowing. In terms of social indicators, school enrolment in the three northern Regions is still the lowest in the country, even though the gap is narrowing. Yet, while over half of the population in the South is literate (54 %), in the North this is still less than one third (32 %)!
More worrying is that particularly in the economic field, the gap between North and South is widening. In the whole of Ghana in 1992 some 52 % of the population were living below the poverty line. By 1999 it was down to 40 %,. However, for the same period in three regions the poverty actually increased, of which two were located in the North. In Upper East Region the increase was by 32 %, and by 1999 almost 90 % of the people there were considered living in poverty. Out of every 10 people, 9 are poor! Take away the people with access to some income, e.g. teachers, civil servants, some traders and households benefiting from remittances, and just about everybody else is poor.
Some projections have been done on what could happen to poverty in Ghana by 2015, if policies and international conditions do not change. The prediction is that in 2015 the poverty head count will be down to 23 % for Ghana, a further decrease of 40 % since 1999. But the same projections indicate poverty figures in the three northern Regions between 60 and 70 %, hence without ‘the burden of the North’ poverty in Ghana would be down to 10 % in 2015. While the Northern Region in 1992 was 11 % behind the national average, by 2015 this will be 33 %, so the gap is widening. Similarly for Upper East (from 15 % behind the national average in 1999 to 47 % in 2015) and Upper West Regions (from 36 % to 44 %).
Colonial policies for the North were characterised by brazen neglect and systematic discrimination. Policies and attitudes need to change, if the North is to catch up with the South and fully integrate into the glorious nation of Ghana. There is no alternative. The evidence is there for all to see what happens if discontent over regional differences erupts into serious national conflicts. Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia and Togo are gory reminders of that sordid reality. Fortunately, there are no indications that such is likely to happen now in Ghana. The northern elite is divided, and there is still an economic safety valve through migration, though intra- and inter-ethnic conflicts are far too prevalent. But it does also not need to happen.
The personal route out of poverty for northerners has almost invariably consisted of migration to the south and beyond. And the favoured role for the elite, be it modern or traditional, has been pleading for special government projects or the lobbying for special attention from donors. The political elite, consisting of all the District Chief Executives and Regional Ministers from the three northern Regions, has regularly met over the past few years in what has come to be known as the Mole series. But the Mole series are dominated by the discussion of government and donor projects, rather than in lobbying government for policies, addressing key concerns of the North. The northern elite needs to catch up with the reality that projects, distributed like peanuts to favoured sites, does not bring social and economic development.
Likewise, the role of donors has shifted in northern Ghana, as elsewhere in the world. The era of the 1980s and particularly the 1990s was for northern Ghana dominated by bilateral and multi-lateral agencies, implementing projects either through government or more recently through NGOs. This almost gave the impression as if the government was taking care of the southern part of Ghana, leaving the northern part to international partners. The myriad of signboards for local NGOs in northern Ghana, particularly in Tamale, is a visible remnant of that time. But times and tides have changed. Led by the World Bank, national ownership of development policies is now seen as the only way to bring home-grown development, and many donor agencies are situating their policies within the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy. For some this leads to the pooling of resources, either through Multi-Donor Budget Support or through Sector Wide Approaches (SWAp) for specific sectors. For others, it is more the situating of their projects within larger processes. As GPRS 1 and now 2 do not give specific and systematic attention to the North, donors cannot be expected to do so.
There is no alternative to the government taking leadership in breaking down the barriers blocking social and economic progress in northern Ghana. That is not only in the interest of northern Ghana, but also in the interest of southern Ghana.
*Samuel Zan Akologo is the Ghana country director of SEND Foundation while Rinus van Klinken is affiliated with SNV Ghana.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org
Tagged under Governance Ghana"As for Malawians, talk of regional integration is merely a joke as they visit the holding centre in Blantyre, to see if their relations are among the returnees." Akwete Sande gives a Malawian perspective on the xenophobic violence in South Africa.
====The recent xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa particularly Malawians, Zimbabweans and Mozambiquans have taught several lessons to leaders of Southern Africa.
The first lesson is that their so-called regional integration is an empty message that helps nobody. The people on the ground are hardly affected by their lofty goals of uniting the region, says Joseph Ndhlovu 27, a Johannesburg high school teacher who was among the returnees in the first of the seven buses evacuating over 15,000 Malawians from South African two weeks ago.
Ndhlovu is a second generation resident, born in South Africa of Malawian parents and has never been to Malawi.
“I went to school in Zimbabwe and moved back to South Africa 8 years ago. My parents are buried in South Africa. I don’t know anyone in Malawi,” he says.
According to social welfare officials who are running a temporary holding centre for the returnees in the commercial city Blantyre, people like Ndhlovu will need long term assistance while trying to locate their kin. That means that the government which has already spent a fortune transporting them from South Africa will have to dig deeper into its coffers.
There are many like Ndhlovu among the bitter returnees because Malawi, one the poorest of colonial Africa, used to be the source of cheap labour for the more affluent colonies in Southern Africa. Zimbabwe and South Africa were the favoured destinations due to their better economies.
Mozambiquans and Malawians have until recently have been credited for hard work and honesty. In fact, the first president of Malawi, Hastings Banda, worked in the Johannesburg mines in the 1920s before embarking on a long educational career in the USA and UK
According to the ministry of labour, organized recruitment of Malawians to work in the mines was a source of revenue not only for the illiterate Malawians most of whom managed to build decent houses upon return but for government also.
These organized recruitment ended in the 1980’s after most of the Malawians were accused of spreading HIV to South African nationals because as migrant labourers they were not allowed to bring their spouses.
But the trek Southwards was never been curbed, many Malawians continued to go South and in some cases professionals disappointed with poor working conditions at home made South Africa their new home.
Mary a mother of 3 who arrived home with a small bag of clothes narrates her ordeal.
“Both my husband and I were working. We were in South Africa for 9 years, and built our own house. In the fateful day, my husband was working night shift and I was alone with our three kids. I heard a nock and when I opened the door I found five people armed, they were my neighbours but they ordered me out, told me to run away or else they would kill me. I pleaded with them to allow me stay for the night but they refused. I managed to take my children out and run to the nearest Police station. For three days we had no food until social workers came to our rescue. I have not heard from my husband. I don’t know what happened to him,” she laments.
Unlike Ndhlovu Mary had relatives who came to pick her up and took her back to Zomba, about 100 Km from Blantyre.
The Chairperson of Malawi Human Rights Consultative Committee, Undule Mwakasungura and the Director of Malawi Human Rights Commission, Dorothy Nyasulu issued statements condemning the attacks. They also organized a demonstration against the xenophobic attacks and petitioned the South African ambassador to compensate the victims.
The South African ambassador described the events in her country as embarrassing.
The media reports that over 60 lives have been lost and 250000 displaced but Malawians are not sure how many of their kin have died. The initial figure was five, but it is unclear how many lost their lives.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it has no figures accounting for the number of Malawians living in South Africa because most of them do not register with the embassy.
A human rights activist who once worked at the Malawi embassy in Pretoria says Malawians never report to the embassy because they have bitter memories from when security agents used to harass them and accuse them of working with rebels during the regime of Kamuzu Banda. He says most of Malawian embassies back then were full of security personnel and hence people stayed away. “At one time we had four police officers at the embassy, we didn’t know their work nor did we interact with them. This was true of all Malawian embassies” he said.
The South African media has blamed the country’s security chiefs for failing to notice that there was growing tension in the townships. The South Africans accuse foreigners of taking their jobs, fueling crime, taking their women and of prospering at their expense. Some have blamed Thabo Mbeki for fueling these sentiments through his policy of quiet diplomacy over the economic and political problems in neighbouring Zimbabwe.
An editorial in a local Malawian daily paper argued that careless statements by Mbeki did not help matters because one wonders - if indeed there is no crisis in Zimbabwe why would 3 million Zimbabweans flock to South Africa?
The media argues too that the huge influx of Zimbabweans in South Africa was bound to create problems and that regional leaders are to blame for the mayhem.
Andrew Phiri, a Malawian who has lived in both South Africa and Botswana [another country renowned for anti-foreign sentiments] says these kind of attacks have always happened but on a smaller scale but usually targeted at Zimbabweans.
“There have been sporadic attacks but not to the level we have seen today. Our leaders need to resolve the Zimbabwean problem or else the region remains sitting on a time bomb. South Africans cannot expect to prosper when neighbours are suffering. What if the nationals of neighbouring countries seek revenge? South Africa has huge investments in the region and its nationals are there - will they be safe if there are revenge attacks?” he argues.
While the economy of Malawi appears to be flourishing, unemployment is said to be high. Little manufacturing is taking place as the country continues to be a huge market for imports. This means that for considerable amount of time, the country’s youths will continue to pursue greener pastures abroad. South Africa, despite the current problems will still be an attractive destination.
“I will wait for some time but I will be going there again. Malawians gardeners, cooks and tailors are always in demand there. Even if I worked hard here I can never dream of buying a TV and subscribing to DStv [a satellite television]. What has happened should be regarded as an accident,” says, Francis who refused to disclose his last name.
Francis has lived in the most volatile township - Alexandra in Johannesburg. He too blames president Mbeki for the current problems. He discloses that tension started when Mbeki said there was no crisis in Zimbabwe. The locals started telling Zimbabweans and others to go back to their countries since there was no crisis.
“Though it appears they targeted Malawians, Mozambiquans and Zimbabweans, it should be known that there are other nationals that speak the same languages as South Africans while others from Kenya, Nigeria etc live in big suburbs away from the poverty” he says.
Some employers have hinted that foreign workers are hardworking and they hope the situation will return to normal and the foreigners will return. But such sentiments are usually discounted by union leaders who feel some employers want foreign staff purely to exploit them because they are desperate to have food and shelter and they don’t bargain for better terms.
As for Malawians, talk of regional integration is merely a joke as they visit the holding centre in Blantyre, to see if their relations are among the returnees.
*Akwete Sande is a freelance journalist based in Blantyre, Malawi.
*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Land & Environment South Africahttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/380/48713obama.jpgKali Akuno looks at the limits and contradictions of Obama and argues that the progressives have to use a "combined “outside-inside” strategy that seeks to advance a coherent set of principle demands and push him and the forces he has mobilized sharply to the left."
====Since the stunning Iowa victory of Senator Barack Obama in January, a great deal has been said and written about the declining or ongoing significance of “race” and “racial prejudice” in US society and the prospect of a person of Afrikan descent being its President as proof of its substantive social transformation. While this discussion must be regarded as an advance over the conservative moralistic and race-coded discussions that have dominated political debate in the US since the 1980’s, we must acknowledge its critical limitations.
In the main, these discussions individualize the issues and only engage the behavioral and subjective aspects of inequality and oppression. What is fundamentally missing is a critical discussion of the structural and systemic nature of oppression and exploitation within the US and how the Obama campaign “phenomenon” relates to these structures and dynamics.
This essay seeks to investigate the strategic relationship of the Obama campaign to the structural dynamics of oppression and exploitation within the US. In particular, it will focus on the question of New Afrikan [1] or Black national oppression within the US and how the Obama campaign addresses this oppression. It also seeks to address certain strategic questions that progressive forces within the national liberation and multi-national working class movements must struggle with over the course of the next six months in order to ensure that our demands and interests are advanced – regardless of whether Obama wins or loses the Presidential election in November.
Some of the strategic questions this paper seeks to address are:
- What is Obama’s organic relationship to the New Afrikan or Black nation?
- What class position, alignment and program does Obama represent?
- How does Obama’s campaign strategy and program relate to the historic interests and demands of the Black nation?
WHAT IS THE “NATIONAL QUESTION”?
In summary, from a dialectical materialist framework, the “national question” refers to a) the unequal structural relationship of colonized and oppressed peoples to international capital, oppressor nations, imperialism, and white supremacy and b) to the historic struggles of colonized and oppressed peoples to liberate themselves from these oppressive systems and forces, either in whole or in part (as not all of these “peoples” or “national liberation” struggles have sought to remove themselves from capitalist relations of production).
The inequalities between peoples produced by capitalism are historic. They are rooted in the development of the capitalist world system through the colonization and/or subjugation of the globe and its non-European peoples by the ruling classes of the western European states (i.e. Portugal, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and Italy) beginning in the 15th century.
In order to facilitate the process of capital accumulation they initiated on a world scale, the ruling classes of Europe developed a social system and ideology that divided world production along several lines, some of which predated capitalism, some of which developed specifically to suite capitals historic needs. The pre-capitalist social divisions that were exploited were religion, ethnicity, nationality and patriarchy. The new and fundamentally principal divisions developed by and with capitalism are race and state-bound nationality.
The purpose of exploiting and/or developing these inequalities is a) to facilitate the control of the land, labor, and (material and immaterial) resources of the subject and oppressed peoples and b) to foster competition between and amongst these peoples for the material and social rewards conferred by this exploitative and alienating system.
In the United States the “national question” specifically addresses the structural relationship of colonized, oppressed, and subject peoples to the European settler-colonial project and the imperial national-state apparatus that reinforces it. This project is premised on the genocide and dispossession of indigenous peoples (the First Nations); the enslavement and colonial subjugation of Afrikan peoples and their descendents; and the dispossession and colonial subjugation of Xicanas/os.
THE NEW AFRIKAN NATIONAL QUESTION
Throughout the history of the US settler-colonial project New Afrikans have fundamentally been concentrated in the southeastern portion of the projects possessions. The foundation of this concentration was historically premised on the utilization of enslaved Afrikan labor to produce cash-crops like tobacco, cotton, rice, dyes, and sugar, for international consumption. During the early mercantile stages of capitalist development the climatic conditions, soil quality, and strategic location of these possessions facilitated them being incorporated into the world-capitalist system as a zone of mono-crop commodity production. This population concentration and the relations of production exercised in this zone facilitated the formation of the New Afrikan people as a colonized diasporic Afrikan nation subject to will of the European settler-colonial project and its capitalist-imperialist regime between 1619 and 1865.
The mechanization of agriculture in the Southeastern portion of the settler-colonial state in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, combined with an intense program of labor control and repression during this period, displaced millions of New Afrikans. In the search for refuge and jobs, displaced New Afrikans re-concentrated in the urban industrial centers of the East Coast, Mid-West, and West Coast between the 1910’s – 1960’s. In the process of this resettlement, millions of New Afrikans joined the ranks of the industrial working class. However, they did so fundamentally on an unequal structural basis. Exploiting the subject status of New Afrikan people, capital, the labor bureaucracy, and the various European settler communities relegated New Afrikans to the lowest strata’s of the working class, where they were concentrated in the lowest paid and most hazardous occupations that restricted their ability to earn and accumulate. This process of development established the social and economic terms of New Afrikan national oppression throughout the entire expanse of the US settler-colonial project.
Simultaneously, the vast majority of New Afrikans who remained in the New Afrikan national territory (i.e. the Southeastern portion of the settler-colonial project) became subject to a new regime of accumulation and distorted national development. Reacting to the gains made in the industrial “north” by the multi-national working class movement between the 1930’s – 50’s, industrial capital “outsourced” production to New Afrika to exploit the subjugated status of the New Afrikan working class. Although the New Afrikan working class was kept from effectively organizing itself into labor unions, this development did expand the overall circuit of capital within the New Afrikan nation, which helped stimulate the rise of the civil rights movement and its petit bourgeois program of civil inclusion within the legalistic confines of the settler-colonial project.
The limited social and economic gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements set the present terms of national development for the New Afrikan nation. New Afrika, like all nations and nationalities, is a class stratified social formation. Like all the peoples and nations subjugated and colonized by the European colonial powers, capital and capitalist social relations have articulated New Afrika’s social development. Throughout it’s nearly 400 years of development, the overwhelming majority of New Afrikans have been and are members of the working classes (either as chattel slaves, peasants, or proletarians). However, a very limited New Afrikan bourgeoisie has existed since at least the mid-19th century. Throughout much of New Afrikan history, this extremely small, typically service based petit-bourgeoisie has tended politically to be more progressive than reactionary in its political outlook and program. In the main this bourgeois class has provided leadership to and support for the primary historical demands of the New Afrikan national liberation movement. In summary these demands have been and are:
- Land for self-determining or autonomous development and accumulation
- Equal treatment before the law of the settler-colonial state
- Equitable distribution of the social surplus distributed throughout the settler-colonial state
- Self-determining political power
- Self-reliant and self-sustaining economic development
- Reparations
However, the accumulation gains (meager as they were) of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements combined with major shifts in the relations of production on a worldwide scale, transformed the relationship of the New Afrikan bourgeoisie to the whole of the New Afrikan nation from the 1970’s to the present. The two dominant features of this process of transformation are a) the phenomenal rise of the comprador bourgeoisie in the 1970’s and 80’s, and b) the rapid transformation of this comprador bourgeoisie into a trans-national bourgeoisie from the 1980’s to the present. As will be argued throughout this paper, this transformation not only changed the overall structural composition of the New Afrikan bourgeoisie, it has forever altered its political worldview and program
INTERROGATING THE “NATIONAL” QUESTION
Barack Obama has asserted on several occasions a) that race doesn’t matter and b) that there is only “one” America.
The implication of these statements, even if only stated for strategic affect, is that the national contradictions within the US settler-colonial project have been negated and resolved. Even a cursory glance at the socio-economic inequalities between the various nationalities in the US reveals that these assertions are blatantly false. However, the unprecedented success of Obama’s campaign and the ground it has broke as it relates to a “Black” candidate appealing to white voters on a national level revels that something qualitative has changed in this country. The question is what is it?
I argue that the source of the qualitative change lies in the changing composition of class throughout the US settler-colonial project. The advance of global capital and its transformation of production and accumulation throughout the capitalist world-system generated this compositional shift. I posit that the process of transformation popularly called “globalization” has created a trans-national bourgeoisie and growing multi-national or “cosmopolitan” trans-national service and working classes. It is my position that Barack Obama is a member of and represents the political and economic interests of the trans-national bourgeoisie and the social interests of the growing trans-national classes. More specifically, Barack Obama is a product of the New Afrikan trans-national bourgeoisie, which emerged in the main from the comprador or neo-colonial sector of the New Afrikan bourgeois class between the 1970’s to the present.
The fundamental question regarding this new class composition for progressive and revolutionary forces within the New Afrikan national liberation movement is how to strategically relate to Barack Obama and this trans-national bourgeois class? Is this class (or class fraction) a friend or a foe of the New Afrikan national liberation movement? I argue three things:
- That the material basis for the traditional class collaboration theory of the united and/or national liberation front strategy of oppressed peoples and nations in general, and of its historic application to the New Afrikan national liberation movement in particular, no longer applies.
- That the left has not developed a general or particular theory of how to strategically relate to these new class forces.
- As a result, we are presently ill equipped theoretically and programmatically to address the Obama phenomenon and seize the historic opportunities it presents to advance the interests of the national liberation and multi-national working class movements.
How does the trans-national bourgeoisie differ from other bourgeoisie classes, particularly amongst oppressed nations like the New Afrikan nation? The general theory of national liberation maintains that there are two primary fractions of the capitalist or bourgeois class (that is the class that owns and controls the means of production). These are 1) the national, progressive, or “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie and 2) the comprador or “sell-out”, “Uncle Tom”, or neo-colonial bourgeoisie.
The national or anti-imperialist bourgeoisie is theoretically a progressive force drawn from the organic, inner driven life of the oppressed nation that is materially compelled to promote the development of the productive forces of the nation for its own self-interests and to resist the incursion of imperialism and its suppression of this autonomous national development for these self-same interests.
The comprador or sell-out bourgeoisie is theoretically a reactionary force also drawn from the organic, inner driven life of the oppressed nation, which is conversely compelled to collaborate with imperialism to retard the autonomous or self-determining development of the oppressed nation.
The fundamental difference between these two bourgeois fractions and the transnational fraction is their organic relationship to the oppressed nation. The national and comprador bourgeoisies are dependent upon relations of production within the social and political life of the oppressed nation. Meaning they are both dependent on the working masses of the oppressed nation for their very existence, and hence can be held accountable to the working classes within it in various ways. The trans-national bourgeoisie on the other hand, even though it emerged primarily from the comprador fraction in New Afrika and elsewhere, is not dependent for its existence upon the oppressed nation and its relations of production. The trans-national bourgeoisie, as its name implies, is not a national or national-state bound entity. Its basis for existence lies in exploiting the peoples and working classes of the globe, and it is generally only accountable to or held in check by its fractional partners and rivals (largely through their financial control of various capital markets as exhibited by their deflation of various national-state markets like Mexico in the early-1990’s; Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and South Korea in the late 1990’s; and Brazil and Argentina at the turn of this century).
Now, while I posit that this understanding of Obama’s positioning helps us to understand his relationship with the New Afrikan nation and its historic demands, I argue that we still do not completely understand at this point, how it relates to his mass appeal to white voters in many instances who are not part of this trans-national formation. This I argue, we as progressives and revolutionaries, have to interrogate further to gain a deeper understanding of its strategic potential.
INTERROGATING THE CAMPAIGN
Despite what one may personally think of Obama and the principle merits of his campaign, what we have to acknowledge is that his actions and his campaign are deeply rooted in a particular analysis of how to address national oppression in the US. This analysis is rooted in the “integrationist” and “beloved community” narratives of the New Afrikan petit bourgeois leadership of the Civil Rights Movement and its white liberal bourgeois patrons. The strategy behind this narrative appeal is to highlight the commonalities between the oppressor and oppressed peoples, rather than address their contradictions and differences.
This strategy is rooted in the reality that the road to victory goes through the white electorate and its sheer numerical strength. Based on this reality, I argue there are two historical dynamics that have fundamentally shaped the Obama campaign and its strategy:
1) No Democratic candidate has won a majority of white voters since 1964. For a Democratic candidate to win, they are going to have to win a sizeable portion of, if not the majority of, the white settler vote.
2) The Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988. These two campaigns serve as the primary negative examples for the Obama campaign. They illustrate what NOT to do as an Afrikan candidate running for President, which has determined key aspects of his strategy, particularly his methods of appeal to white and Jewish voters in particular.
Based on these realities, the Obama campaign made a deliberate and strategic choice NOT to base his candidacy in the institutions (like the Black church, civic organizations, unions, and the media) or historic demands (see demands) of the New Afrikan nation. In order to give himself the opportunity to win, Obama must avoid being viewed as a “Black” candidate buy any and all means. This explains in part, why he has distanced himself from the likes of Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Jeremiah Wright – the “traditional” representatives of the “progressive” New Afrikan bourgeoisie.
However, his campaign has also relied upon the staunch support of the Democratic Party by New Afrikan people. New Afrikans have been the most consistent base of support for the Democratic Party since the 1964 election of Lydon B. Johnson. In fact, New Afrikans have voted consistently for Democratic Presidential candidates in the range of 80 – 90% since 1956. This fact however, should not be surprising. Democratic candidates can and do take the New Afrikan vote for granted because in the main, New Afrikans have no other genuine political option to represent their interests. Knowing this, Obama and his campaign know that they have to make few special appeals to New Afrikans and most of the other oppressed peoples within the “traditional” Democratic Party coalition to garner their votes (certain “Latino” populations it can be argued might constitute exceptions).
INTERROGATING THE POPULAR FORCES
Regardless of how marginalized New Afrikan demands and institutions are to the Obama campaign, the fact is that since Obama’s Iowa victory in January, New Afrikans have turned out in near record numbers to support his campaign for the Democratic nomination. How do we explain this outpouring of support despite his lack of engagement with New Afrikan demands and institutions?
Further, how do we explain his victories in states like Iowa, Kansas, Oregon, Colorado, Connecticut, Nebraska, Vermont, and Wyoming where the vast majority of the electorate are white settlers who are not substantively incorporated into the trans-national nexus of production?
Part of the answer I believe lies in the trans-national class developments spoken of earlier. The other part of the answer I believe lies in the popular response to the last 7 years of the Bush regime. As a direct result of the failed occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the accumulation of unprecedented debt, the partisan management of the economy, the exposed lies and deceit, and the hostile, belligerent, and dictatorial “style” of management, this election is in many ways serving as a popular anti-Bush referendum.
The popular, multi-national, multi-class forces engaging the Obama campaign are clearly clamoring for a change of management. This was first evidenced in the elections of 2006 and has been further illustrated in several off-term Congressional elections in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi where Democrats took elections in long-held Republican districts. Barack Obama, for reasons of personal history (including his newness to Capital Hill), style (particularly his cultivated charisma and flair for the optimal, however programmatically empty it may be), and strategy (including a tacit exploitation of cultural stereotypes about New Afrikan people being good listeners and empathizers) has thus far demonstrated that he would be a profoundly different manager than either of his remaining Democrat or Republican rivals.
What I think progressives and revolutionaries have to be clear on in relating to these popular forces is that a clamoring for a change of management does not equate to a clamoring for a fundamental change of program. It is on the question of program that I would argue that the national question strongly reenters the fry and could perhaps fracture the broad multi-national, multi-class alliance thus far mobilized by the Obama campaign.
For instance, the historic demands of New Afrikan people are not going to go away without a revolutionary transformation of the US settler-colonial state. In fact, as the mortgage crisis deepens over the course of the next 2 to 4 years, some of the demands, like economic development and reparations perhaps, are only going to become stronger.
Likewise, the trans-national capital interests supporting Obama’s campaign have no intentions of stopping their accumulation mission. Rather, they are trying to expand it through the application of a friendlier management approach of their primary regulating instruments – namely the US military, treasury, and Federal Reserve Bank. And further, many of the white service and working class voters who are supporting Obama are not demanding an end to imperialism and globalization, but a return to the high standards of living they are accustomed and feel entitled to as settlers, i.e. “Americans”.
INTERROGATING THE MOMENT
This is an extremely unique moment in human history, one that should not be slept on by progressives and revolutionaries anywhere, let alone in the US.
There are three general things that make this moment particularly unique:
- The rapid collapse of the ecological systems that support human civilization as a direct consequence of the capitalist world-systems need for constant growth and expansion and its dependence on a petro-chemical driven system of mass industrial production to stimulate and sustain this growth.
- The declining hegemony (in both its geo-political and Gramscian connotations) of the US imperial state and the shift to a multi-polar geo-political world order.
- The comparative weakening of the US national economy and the deepening of trans-national production and accumulation.
In order to be properly contextualized, the Obama campaign and corresponding “phenomenon” must be situated as a direct response to this unique moment in history. As has been argued earlier, his campaign is clearly a factional response, one fundamentally serving the interests of the trans-national bourgeoisie and its means and instruments of accumulation and rule. The two fundamental questions stemming from this assessment are: is this class and the alliance of forces it has amassed strong enough to contain the contradictions it has unleashed AND can it continue its accumulation program and political project without a major transformation away from petro-chemical dependent production?
I argue that the answer to both questions is emphatically, NO. Returning to our focus of analyzing the Obama campaign in relation to the New Afrikan national question, there are several examples that clearly illustrate why.
The trans-national program of accumulation is fundamentally driven by a finance driven post-Fordist, intelligence dominated system of production. The intense mechanization of this production regime is rapidly dislocating millions, if not billions, of workers, worldwide. The New Afrikan working class was one of the first and most devastated sectors of the international proletariat hit by this accumulation regime. Since the 1970’s, millions of New Afrikans have been economically dislocated and physically displaced by this transformation, which is only set to worsen with the crisis of finance (witnessed with the mortgage crisis that robbed millions of New Afrikans of their merge capital equity) and the deepening of global production. What is also clear is that the options of absorbing this surplus labor into the low-wage service economy or warehousing (i.e. incarcerating) it, is reaching its political and financial limits. The likely outcomes of the escalating crisis are:
- More intense economic dislocation
- More intense physical displacement and forced relocation (New Orleans being a clear precedent)
- More intense and concentrated New Afrikan resistance
An escalation of the demands made on the state and capital by New Afrikans
As a representative of the trans-national bourgeoisie, its production regime, and the US imperial state, how would Obama be compelled to address these contradictions? I argue that he would fundamentally have to exercise the Nixon option as it related to the New Afrikan nation (and other oppressed nations within and beyond US national-state boarders). Plainly stated the Nixon option is the calculated employment of “carrot and the stick” stratagems. Obama’s carrot would be to ameliorate or buy off a sectors of the New Afrikan bourgeoisie and working class by offering a set of concessions, primarily in the realm of loan forgiveness (for the mortgage crisis) and job training programs (more than likely for “Green Jobs” and the like). The stick would be the strategic application of state repression against resistant and non-compliant forces within the New Afrikan working class. The purpose of the Nixon option now, as during his Presidency in the late 60’s and early 70’s, would be to fracture the political unity of the New Afrikan nation against the trans-national bourgeoisie and its program.
Staying with our analysis, it is also clear that the Green transformation option is a dead end for the trans-national bourgeoisie and its program. Although elements of the trans-national bourgeoisie are clearly leading the charge for the development of “green” capitalism, it is not, and in fact cannot, advocate for the transformation of scale needed to curb the production of greenhouse gases to stall or reverse climate change without bankrupting itself. As a result, it cannot and will not generate enough “Green Jobs” to reincorporate the millions of New Afrikans that have been economically dislocated by trans-national production.
Yet in still, what we can posit with confidence at this moment is that capital is going to go to extreme lengths to extend its life and barbaric domination over human civilization. Conversely, as the events of the last 7 years have illustrated, we should also expect to see an escalation and diversification of resistance.
OUTLINING A FRAMEWORK TO SEIZE THE MOMENT
So, how should the New Afrikan and multi-national liberation and working class movements strategically engage this historic campaign and critical moment?
One of the first priorities of engagement is theoretical development. One of the principle things the New Afrikan and multi-national left movements must figure out is how to engage to the trans-national bourgeoisie. As stated earlier, as of now, our movements do not have a general, let alone united, perspective on this question. In fact, I would argue that most of our forces are still utilizing the traditional united or national liberation front theory to determine their positions and courses of action.
I argue that because the trans-national bourgeoisie cannot be easily pressured by the national liberation and working class movements within the US setter-colonial project, these movements should not invest the majority of their time and energy engaging an “inside” strategy of critical engagement with the Obama campaign. I argue that thinking strategically, these forces should concentrate their energy on building autonomous political movements and institutions (like the Reconstruction Party) within the US national-state that seek to build a broad multi-national united front of oppressed peoples and workers that makes a principle of building strategic links and alliances with the autonomous national liberation, international working class, global justice, and environmental movements throughout the world. As the trans-national bourgeoisie thinks and acts globally, we must also think and act globally to advance our own interests.
However, as the vast majority of our peoples and forces are going to support the Obama campaign and potential Presidency, in the short-term we tactically have to invest a critical degree of time and energy engaging them, if only to try an win a considerable portion of these forces to a left perspective and program. And it is here that we need theoretical clarity. How do we offer a radical critic of Obama, his class position, interests, and program without alienating ourselves from the popular masses? How do we move these forces to engage in autonomous self-determining action outside of the Democratic Party? How do we educate and move the white settler forces mobilized by Obama to actively engage an anti-racist, anti-imperialist perspective and program?
To these ends, a hard-pressed counter campaign against Obama I would argue is not the most effective or productive way to engage these popular forces from this point forward. Rather, I think the multi-national left must seek to highlight the contradictions of Obama’s campaign and program through a combined “outside-inside” strategy that seeks to advance a coherent set of principle demands and push him and the forces he has mobilized sharply to the left. Again, I think the formation of an autonomous “outside” political force should be primary. However, what is perhaps most tactically critical is that both the “outside” and “inside” forces aggressively promote and propagate these common demands; vigorously dialogue and debate in a principled, non-sectarian manner; and openly communicate and collaborate whenever and wherever possible.
Some of the primary strategic demands that must be raised are drawn from the historic demands of oppressed peoples, particularly New Afrikans, combined with the demands of the multi-national working class, women’s, and environmental justice movements. The combination of these demands will expose not only the limits of the trans-national bourgeoisie and its production regime, but of US imperialism itself and its inability to make good on its democratic promises, either at “home” or abroad. Some of the most critical of these demands include [2]:
1. The full and immediately ending of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. The full and unqualified support for Palestinian self-determination and the Right to Return.
3. The full and immediate Right of Return for the more than 250,000 New Afrikans displaced from their homelands in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
4. The repeal of the “war on drugs” and mandatory minimum sentencing that has resulted in the imprisonment of more than 2.5 million people, the vast majority of whom are New Afrikans.
5. The full support for the rights of women and the LGBTQ communities, including full support for initiatives like the Equal Rights Amendment and “gay” marriage.
6. The full and immediate repeal of the various Patriot Acts and other undemocratic anti-terror laws and Executive Orders.
7. The full, complete, and unconditional amnesty for the millions of migrant and displaced workers in the US.
8. The full and unqualified commitment to reduce the carbon imprint of the US by 80% or more by 2016 to stem the production of climate changing greenhouse gases.
9. The commitment to the public financing of alternative solar, wind, aquatic, and organic energy to sustain the economy, and the elimination of all nuclear energy and hard metal extraction.
10. Reparations for Indigenous, New Afrikan, Xicano, Puerto Rican, Hawaiian and other peoples and nations colonized by the US (including Guam, Alaskan natives, etc.).
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION
Although the road ahead may not be clear, and the outcome of our actions far from certain, the New Afrikan national liberation movement, and the movements of all oppressed and exploited peoples, must seize this critical moment. The survival of humanity demands that we must act, and act in our own interests. Barack Obama nor any other bourgeois messiah is not going to liberate us. We must liberate ourselves.
*Kali Akuno is an organizer with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). He wrote this essay to honor the 83rd Birthday of Malcolm X and the clarity he brought to the New Afrikan revolutionary movement.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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Tagged under Governancehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/379/48640water.jpgIf women had control over water as resource "they would be better placed to manage its use, especially in agriculture, which is the principal economic activity in Burundi, and is controlled by women." Concilie Gahungere looks at the access to water in Burundi in relation to gender.
====Mrs Immaculee S. lives in Gikungu Rural location, which falls in the urban Gihosha district. She is 65 and lives alone with no children or domestic help. Even though she lives close to a residential area, she has no access to clean water. Everyday, she takes a 10-litre jerrican, and goes off in search of water. With her jerrican, she begs her neighborhood “bosses” for a little water. With an air of resignation, she describes how her neighbors receive her: “sometimes they open their big gates, and other times they look at us through the gate, without opening it”. She says the administration must look into providing clean water for the poor and the old. “We are old and poor, we neither have the money to pay for water, nor do we have young children to look after us”, she laments.
Mrs. Immaculee is one of many Burundian women without access to clean water. Article 15 of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa stipulates under the right to food security, that states must ensure women’s access to adequate and safe nutrition. In this regards, it sets in to necessary mechanisms to:
- provide women with access to clean drinking water, sources of domestic fuel, land, and the means of producing nutritious food;
- establish adequate systems of supply and storage to ensure food security.
Mrs Odette Kayitesi is the former minister for environment. In her view, the Burundian woman’s access to clean water is a critical issue that has been debated for a long time and is still not resolved. The access water, Burundian women have to travel long distances. Often, she covers these huge distances to obtain water that is, in the final analysis, not fit for drinking. She is sometimes forced to draw water from streams for all her home needs, including drinking.
Mrs. Kayitesi laments that the lack of water points within easy access has grave hygiene consequences for the family, both in terms of the transmission of disease, and the future of the girl child. Young girls are forced to abandon the education in order to help their mothers seek out water for household use.
In Burundi, some regions have very few water sources or catchment areas. Even where there is water, the difficulty lies in making it easily accessible. This is the case in the North, the East and the North-Eastern regions. On the other hand, the central plateaus, and the Munirwa regions have sufficient water supply.
WATER ISSUES IN THE CITY
Women living in the city are not spared either when it comes to lack of clean drinking water, states Kayitesi. Some women are forced to draw water from the rivers that criss-cross Bujumbura, such as the Ntahangwa and the Rusizi. In Kayitesi’s view, there is a problem of lack of sensitization, because too many women are still underestimate the importance of clean drinking water. Another problem is that many women in poor neighborhoods do not have the resources to obtain clean drinking water. The cost of living on Burundi is very high, and more so for the poor.
WOMEN AND WATER MANAGEMENT
Our sources indicate that based on the available data, the percentage of the population with access to clean drinking water is very low. During the recent African Water Week held in Tunis, it was noted that only a small percentage of the population have access to clean drinking water and that countries have to intensify efforts by increasing drilling for clean water. Governments have been asked to meet new targets in the 2020-2025 period.
Kayitesi calls on citizens to maintain water point, noting that the population still does not take enough responsibility in protecting what already exists in the interests of sustainability.
Solange Habonimana, former chairperson of CAFOB (Collectif des Associations et ONG féminines du Burundi), agrees that Burundian women have inadequate access to water. In cases where women have access, they have no control or decision-making power. If women had decisive control over the resource, she would be better placed to manage its use, especially in agriculture, which is the principal economic activity in Burundi, and is controlled by women.
*Concilie Gahungere is the coordinator of CAFOB (Collectif des Associations et ONG féminines du Burundi). This article was translated from French by Joshua Ogada.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Land & Environment Burundihttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/379/48637pots.jpgThis year's African Union Summit, 24th June to 1st July 2008, will be on ‘Meeting the Millennium Development Goals on Water and Sanitation’. What should African leaders take into account when thinking about how to meet these goals and those of The African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa? Catherine Irura tackes this question.
====The African Union Summit is here with us again and on 24th June to 1st July 2008, African leaders will be discussing ‘Meeting the Millennium Development Goals on Water and Sanitation’. As our leaders deliberate on this very important topic we must ask ourselves whether our leaders will take into consideration women’s concerns over water and sanitation and remind them that women amount to almost more than half of the population in Africa and that their voices must not be ignored. In this article we voice some of the concerns that women would like their leaders to take into consideration as they debate on this issue.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) goal number 7 calls on governments to ensure environmental sustainability. The goal is to reduce the proportion of the people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and states as an indicator the proportion of the population using improved drinking water sources and using improved sanitation facilities. [1]. Whereas the MDG’s voices the promise to alleviate poverty from the world it is not legally binding on Governments but instead forms the minimum standards for which all countries in the world should aim to achieve. As a result many countries have continuously used the MDG’s as a standard for their policy and planning processes. The MDG’s as goal 3 also call on governments to promote gender equality and empower women at all levels including in decision making and policy formation.
The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa substantially addresses issues and challenges that women face everyday including those relating to water and sanitation. State parties are required to ensure that women have access to clean drinking water [2] and it further advocates for women’s access and control over productive resources and most importantly participation of women in conceptualization, decision-making, implementation and evaluation of development policies and programmes [3]. This is a home grown instrument that was adopted by the African Union to benefit women in Africa. The Millennium Development goals and the protocol therefore merge in buttressing the place of women in sustainable development, and their incorporation in planning procedures [4].
Water and sanitation is critical to environmental sustainability while sanitation refers to interventions to reduce people’s exposure to disease by providing a clean environment in which to live by taking measures involving both provision of facilities and behaviors which work together to form a hygienic environment [5]. There are various uses of water such as for food, sanitation, personal hygiene, care of the sick, crop irrigation and for the care of domestic livestock and poultry. Women in Africa in an effort to ensure that their families and livestock are well taken care of will walk 10–15 kilometers to get water and carry up to up to 15 litres of water per trip [6] yet their significant role in water and sanitation is constantly overlooked. Women are direct users, providers and managers of water in households and they are guardians of household hygiene [7]. This should be the basis upon which women should be fully involved in public decision making with regard to water resources. Improvement of the quality, quantity and access to clean water liberates women and young girls freeing up their time to engage in income generating activities, education and public life.
States’ failure to uphold the right to water for all infringes on the rights of women as household caretakers because they have to go the extra mile to gain access to water, which is a basic right [8]. In lower income rural areas, women have to use lower quality water which makes the household susceptible to waterborne diseases [9] which in turn drains the limited household resources due to the medical expenses incurred. The unavailability of clean water then becomes burdensome for women reducing the quality of life as they have to forgo other rights to gain basic necessities.
Women usually have no rights and/or access to land for varying legal and cultural reasons yet they are the majority of the world’s agricultural producers, playing important roles in farming, fisheries, forestry and farming. They are the least title holders among the property holders in the world [10]. For example in Kenya, customary law generally limits ownership of land and only entitles access to communal land so long as a woman is married. Legislative provisions may be gender neutral but the application of land law is gendered [11]. Most land is registered in the name of the eldest male of a household. This not only excludes women from the registration process but further predicates the rights to use land to the rights of the male title holder.
Additionally, there is little incentive for women to make environmentally sound decisions and their lack of access to credit (of which land may be required as security) hampers them from buying technologies and inputs that would be less damaging to natural resources. As providers, their willingness to eke out a bare existence despite access to agricultural resources and education on viable methods of farming may make them adapt to less labour-intensive crops and practices that may harm the environment [12] and drain the water resources. These factors may lead to declining productivity and increased environmental degradation. Recognition of women as land holders and contributors to development would motivate them to protect the environment and desire to realize the full value of land in agricultural production.
Women are also increasingly becoming heads of households partly due to the numerous conflicts in Africa, HIV/AIDS and other existing social problems. This means that they are solely responsible for providing for their families and take part in farming activities yet they do not have the legal rights to access water and land (which are the main source of livelihood). Since many women do not own land, women and girls constantly face the threat of becoming economically unstable and dependant on their male relatives or husbands. In the eventuality of economic despair they may turn to means such as prostitution or transactional sex, or bowing to certain cultural practices such as wife inheritance that expose them to sexually transmitted diseases and other health risks.
The absence of clean water acutely increases the impact of HIV/AIDS. The causes and consequences of HIV are related to wider issues revolving around poverty, food security and water and sanitation. Bad hygienic conditions affect people living with HIV and they need more water for better health and general hygiene. This somewhat suspends household responsibilities as death takes away family members leaving destitute children and elderly people [13]. In impoverished rural areas, where women themselves are sick and dying it means that they cannot walk long distances to get water.
It is a fact that the proximity of sanitary facilities to the household increases security and privacy for women. It also reduces health and digestive system problems that arise when women have to wait until nighttime to relieve themselves. Separate sanitation facilities for girls and boys in schools also boost the school attendance of girls and ensure a safe and healthier learning environment. For mothers and pregnant women, improved water supply sanitation and hygiene leads to better health and reduced labour burdens and reduced mortality rates for children.
Poor families cannot afford to buy sanitary towels or tampons for their women and girls to use and women use old rags, leaves, toilet paper or sometimes nothing at all. Poor sanitation heightens the awkward conditions women face during menstruation because it is difficult to concentrate knowing there is no water, proper sanitary facilities or sanitary towels to use. Students and female teachers may feign sickness during their menses to avoid going to school altogether. Given that on average a woman has her cycle 13 times and menstruates 4 days per period, that amounts to 52 days which is almost 2 months in a year. That is a considerable amount of time to miss out on learning and it negatively affects the general performance of girls in school. In Rwanda secondary school girls have even proposed for increase in tuition fees so that schools can provide sanitary towels [14].
It cannot be disputed that sanitary towels are basic necessities for women and promotes their sexual and reproductive health. Article 14 (1) of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa requires state parties to respect and promote and the right to sexual and reproductive health of women. Despite the separate provisions for sanitation and reproductive health, we need to recognize the relation between sanitation and sexual and reproductive health and their effect on the living conditions of women. Lack of adequate sanitation and clean water makes women susceptible to infections that affect their sexual and reproductive health. The use of materials such as old rags and other unhygienic materials cause a number of health problems for women which in turn can affect their reproductive health. Often women have no resources and even time to seek proper medical treatment and for many women in the rural areas health facilities are often located far away and are inaccessible. States must ensure that when discussing about water and sanitation they take into consideration how the lack of these two impact women and the society at large.
Careers and training areas around water supply and sanitation are dominated by men. There is a need to break the social barriers restricting the participation of women in community based forums or public consultations that influence water policies from the grassroots level. If water management is to be democratic and transparent, it should represent the needs of all, that is to say that men and women ought to have an equal say. This process needs to delineate the specific roles and needs of men and women in water management and how both can be incorporated for equal and sustainable use of resources. Some of the basic rights are intertwined, for example the rights to water and land, and a practical approach needs to be established.
During times of war and conflict, sanitation facilities in camps are generally poor and women rely on foreign aid to cater for their needs. Women are the worst hit by shortages of water and poor sanitation because they have to travel longer distances to search for water under very insecure conditions. Gender inequalities regarding political, economic status, human rights, education and health increase the risks during health hazards [15]. There is a need for women to be integrated in the process of peace building and natural resource management.
In conclusion, despite the preponderance of various international instruments underlining the status of women in access to water supply and sanitation, more needs to be done at the enforcement level. There should be some active reflection of the substance of these laws and adjustment of procedures that hinder access of women to resources. The African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women and the United Nations Millennium Development goals have given Africa leaders standards that they can adopt to ensure that the right to water and proper sanitation is assured to all citizens and most importantly to women who are the caretakers of homes and the users of water and sanitation for the benefit of their families and society as a whole. African leaders can no longer afford to ignore the voice of women.
*Catherine Irura is a Law Student at the University of Nairobi and currently an intern with Equality Now, Africa Regional Office.
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Tagged under Gender & Social Justicehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/379/48636drink.jpgWater and Sanitation are critical elements in a sustainable livelihood strategy as it is directly related to issues of access to and control over natural resources as well as basic infrastructure and services. It has been noted that the problems of water and sanitation affect more than 800 million people- 15 percent of the world’s population and most of these are in the South of Sahara (ibid). For interested parties to come up with approaches to curb this problem, there is need to have a clear understanding of the interconnectedness of the two. Thus, the benefits of water will not be seen unless attention is also given to sanitation (Anderson 1996).
However, this article is not going to look at the approaches to overcome the water and Sanitation problem. It is going to focus at the role gender plays in Mozambique in the supply of water and Sanitation. Lastly, it will conclude with recommendations to the responsible authority so that they can be in a position to take an active part in ensuring that the Mozambican citizens have the right to better water supplies and sanitation conditions.
THE MOZAMBICAN SITUATION
Through the 2007-8 budget, the Government of Mozambique has clearly defined water, sanitation and urban development as one of its priorities. This is no other than sustainable development of the population life through the improvement of its life conditions. Thus, this brings to focus the importance of water supply and sanitation for the entire population. The National Campaign launched in February is coordinated by the Ministry of Health, together with its partners (governmental institutions, International Agencies and NGO national and international). The general objectives of this Campaign were;
- To contribute for the change of hygienic habit of the citizens. - To improve the individual hygienic conditions, conscientise and appeal people in order to change behaviour related to their habit of individual and collective habits of hygiene.
- To concretise its efforts and calls for the participation and involvement of all the citizens to promote better water supply and sanitation.
THE ROLE OF GENDER IN THE WATER SUPPLY AND SANITATION
As far as water supply and sanitation in Mozambique are concerned, gender plays a paramount role. In most African cultures, it has been noted that women are the most responsible for the use and management of water resources, sanitation and health at the household level. Mozambique is not exception.
WOMEN
Both in cities and rural areas, women have the responsibility of fetching water and educating children hygienic matters. Women and girls are often obliged to walk many hours every day queuing in water points in the cities or walking long distances to fetch water, mainly in the rural areas, while men are rarely expected to perform such tasks. As they are linked to the house chores, they are mainly the ones who bear the heavy burden of trying to provide it to the family. They make sure that the laundry is done, flowers and gardens are watered and animals are given water. Women do little as far as building water sources (Water fountains) are concerned. The same applies to sanitation. They are not the ones who build the toilets (pit latrines) but they take an active role in making sure that they are clean. They also participate in community activities while men were linked to the culture.
MEN
Men are generally concerned with the building role. They are the ones who make sure that the water structures are built. In the rural area, they are the ones who dig wells and build them. They are also responsible when it comes to digging and construction pit latrines. Unlike women, they do not take an active role in maintaining the structures.
Given the fact that the Mozambican society is male dominated, most of the decision-making regarding the issue of Water and Sanitation lies in the hands of men. On the other hand women are given less opportunities to air their views and ideas on those issues. This makes them not heard. Therefore, they have very little contribution as far as this issue is concerned.
SUCCESS AND CHALLENGES
The latest report assessing progress on water and sanitation in Mozambique noted that rural water supply coverage grew significantly out of 1.055 planed water sources the number of spread water sources was 1.529. The rate of coverage also has shown the increase of rural and urban water 48.5% and 40% respectively. This gave access to drinking water to more than 9.871.523 families.
On the other hand the coverage of sanitation also increased to 47% in urban areas. Within the scope of decentralization of funds, the sector defined a new role in each level and started the process of decentralization of funds of District and Provincial levels to help with the implementation of the strategic plan of rural water and sanitation.
However the audit of performance on water for 2006-2007 found problems in finance management, a weak performance in relation to revenues, a lack of data on fund use, and lack of desegregated datas on gender in terms of access.
Nevertheless, water supply within the rural and urban communities can greatly reduce time and efforts for women looking for water.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Given the role of gender in the supply of water and sanitation in Mozambique, here are some of the recommendations we can make;
- The management of water and sanitation becomes the most important strategy resource essential for the sustainable life and achieving of the sustainable development in our country and the government should stump its efforts to up lift the lives of its citizen. It should also see to it that priorities are given to the right people. There have been situations of a project failing because attention was targeted at the wrong people.
- There is need to offer equal opportunities for sharing ideas and views for both men and women regarding water and sanitation issues.
- There must be enough consultation to the targeted people or communities be it in the urban or rural areas.
- All the gender needs should be addressed from the planning stage up to the evaluation.
- All responsible NGO working for the improvement of water supply and sanitation should work collectively to combat this problem.
- As both men and women play very significant roles in the society, there must be avenues to enhance educative programs in which the roles of both parties are stressed. There is need also to overcome the presumption of female inferiority.
- It is also important to recognise the different roles played by man and women whenever we design the project or in the planning thus can increase chances for project sustainability and at the same time for the development of the country.
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Tagged under Gender & Social Justice Mozambiquehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/379/48635tank.jpgWhat does gender have to do with issues of sanitation and water? Roselyenn Musa gives us a multi-faceted gender perspectives that consider the role of African governments, gender awareness and water privatization amongst others.
====INTRODUCTION
The upcoming mid-year African Union (AU) summit of heads of state and government has as its primary agenda as ‘Water and Sanitation.’ Development goals in the water and sanitation sector in Africa typically address issues of access to and the availability of adequate and safe supply and services, health and well being of all members of the society. At the Millennium Summit in 2000, Heads of State pledged to halve the proportion of people who are unable to reach or to afford safe drinking water by the year 2015 yet at the end of 2002 some 1.1 billion people or 18% of the world’s population lacked access to safe drinking water, while 2.6 billion or 40 % of the world’s population lacked access to improved sanitation services.
Gender issues are applicable when conditions are bone dry and also when they are dangerously wet. Women and children are the first to suffer from the disruption of water supply and the provision of sanitation services. They are disproportionately affected by natural and ‘man made’ disasters as a result of gender inequalities. They play a central part in the provision, management and safeguarding of water and sanitation, but the pivotal role they play as providers and users of water and has seldom been reflected in institutional arrangements for the development and management of these resources.
This essay considers the concept of gender in the context of water supply, sanitation and hygiene development. It recalls the commitments of African governments to gender in the broader framework of international instruments. It then analyses why gender is central to water and sanitation and the implications of water privatization. It concludes with some suggestions to meet the challenge of enabling change, recommending gender awareness as one o the keys to sustainable development in water and sanitation.
DEFINING GENDER AND CONTEXT
For the purpose of this paper the term ‘gender’ describes the social relations between and characteristics of women and men. It concerns men’s and women’s participation in the determination of their lives including access to rights, power and control over resources. In most African countries men’s and women’s gender roles determine their access to, power and control over adequate water supply and sanitation services. Locating Water and Sanitation In International Gender Equality Instruments The United Nations Decade for Women and Development’s (1976-1985) themes of equality, development and peace signaled the way for international debate that encompassed the broad spectrum of development issues.
The United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (UN CEDAW, 1981) proved to be a major step forward in fostering debate and setting international standards of gender equality. Article 14 (2) calls on states to take account of particular problems faced by women and the significant role that they play in the economic survival of families. It calls for measures to eliminate discrimination against women and ensuring women’s right to enjoy adequate living conditions with respect to housing, sanitation, electricity and water supply. The United Nations 4th World Conference on Women (Beijing 1995) also calls on governments to ensure that women’s priorities are included in public investment programmes for economic infrastructure such as water and sanitation, electrification etc.
The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of women in Africa in Articles 2 and 15 enjoins governments to provide women with access to clean drinking water, enact and effectively implement appropriate legislative or regulatory measures, including those prohibiting and curbing all forms of discrimination particularly regarding those harmful practices which endanger the health and general well-being of women. It is depressing to note that most African countries’ commitments to these instruments remain only on paper.
GENDER ISSUES IN WATER SUPPLY
In developing countries some 3 billion people do not have basic access to a tap. Women and very often young girls are primarily burdened with the responsibility of fetching water for household use, transport, store and use it for cooking, cleaning, washing, and watering household animals. Men are rarely expected to perform such tasks. Yet all too often decisions about the design and location of water facilities are made without the involvement of the female users, who have most at stake in this regard.
Women and girls spending up to 6-8 hours a day collecting water can consume up to a third of daily caloric intake often bringing back a mere 15 to 20 litres which has to cover the needs of a whole family leading to rationing water in the household. Many infectious diseases are associated with poor water quality.
Carrying this heavy load consumes much of their energy (requiring 600 to 800 calories of food per day). This chore often deprives girls of time to attend school or mothers a job. It presents a health hazard, especially during development and pregnancy periods. They face the risk of drowning if the water source is a river and injuries from attacks during conflicts. With closer water comes less danger, greater self-esteem, less harassment of women and better school attendance by girls.
Water and sanitation go hand in hand, e.g. sewage thrown into the river which is a source of water supply often leads to its pollution. When there is no proper sanitation the risk of disease is higher. It is the women who have to look after sick children, and the young daughters who lose out on education.
GENDER ISSUES IN SANITATION
The UN has declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation, and a lot still need to be done to make a difference. Human waste disposal is often a taboo subject due to cultural and gender boundaries even though it presents one of the most pressing needs
There is a need to understand the implications of gender in the broader definition of sanitation. Most of the time bad sanitation denotes a lack of toilets or latrines at home, in schools or public places. Sharing of latrines can also be a deterrent to their use by women because they do not want to be seen entering or leaving the toilet and they often have to wait until dark to defecate or urinate.
This has a number of detrimental effects including security in terms of rape and harassment and health in terms of infections that may affect future fertility. Equally invasive are issues of privacy and personal hygiene related to menstruation, washing and bathing. At school there are often no facilities for menstruating girls and where latrines exist they are often expected to share facilities with boys.
While women are mostly responsible for cleaning sanitation units they often do so without any training on the use of protective gloves and anticeptics. This could result in poor hygiene and exposure to bacteria and several parasitic infections resulting in outbreak of epidemics.
PRIVATIZATION AND THE RIGHT TO WATER
Privatization of water services versus the right to water has been controversial. Water for basic needs has been identified primarily as a public good and a human right and not as a commodity to be traded in the open market for profit.
This does not imply that the government should supply water free to the population, but implies that shifting responsibility to large private corporations may supersede attention to human needs and rights and private companies may remain largely unaccountable to the people they are supposed to benefit. This could force poor women to use contaminated water that is free rather than clean water, which they cannot afford. This of course impacts the health of the community, and may result in much higher costs in health care.
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Water and sanitation goals may seem ambitious, but they are very modest as these goals do not envisage providing a tap in every kitchen or a flush toilet in every house. Access to clean water and sanitation does not only improve the health of a family, but it also provides an opportunity for girls to go to school, and for women to use their time more productively than in fetching water thereby contributing more to the economy..
Gender mainstreaming would ensure the participation of women in capacity building, design and management of water and sanitation services, but care should be taken not lead to more work and responsibilities for women and exempt or bypass men, but equitably distribute benefits and burdens between the sexes.
Budgets are a critical tool for mainstreaming. If gender considerations are built into policies and project design, they should reflect in resource allocation otherwise they will not deliver substantive equality for women. Also key is increased gender awareness, through training at all levels to achieving sustainable development.
*Roselynn Musa is the Advocacy Officer at the African Women’s Development and Communications Network, (FEMNET) in Nairobi, Kenya.
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Tagged under Gender & Social Justicehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/378/48557woman.jpgIn addition to the psychological trauma of sexual violence, Miriam Madziwa argues that the violence is likely to have an adverse effect on women's participation in politics into the future.
====There is haunting weariness in Precious Zhove's eyes as she recounts events leading to her fleeing her home in Mberengwa in Zimbabwe's southern region. Clutching at her 18-month-old baby, she relives the horror of the day war veterans, ZANU PF supporters, and soldiers descended on her homestead looking for her husband Joab Gumbo, who contested to be a councilor under a Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) ticket.
"I was trying to tell them I did not know where my husband was since it was in the afternoon. They grabbed my baby, this one here and tied a sack around her waist then one of them started swinging her while holding her by the legs.”
"They said she was an MDC baby so they were going to take her away from me. They said that way me and my husband would have another baby, a Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) baby this time, because they don't like MDC people, and they are sell-outs."
While she pauses to catch her breath, she sighs, "Oh not again," and shifts the baby on her lap. The baby has no nappy, so her skirt has become wet. She explains the baby has no nappies or warm clothing. "I didn't have time to pack anything. The moment my husband returned home we left."
Zhove’s story is just one of many I have listened to in recent weeks as more and more families in rural Matabeleland and Midlands flee from harassment, intimidation, and beatings characterising the post March 29 period in Zimbabwe.
Media show images of injuries caused by the brutal attacks. The footage and reports are frightening. Burnt buttocks, breasts severed, limbs broken, and backs festering with wounds from plastic burns. Stories of pregnant women having their stomachs cut open or men young enough to be their grandsons raping elderly women.
Yet, away from the cameras, audio recorders, and notebooks there is emotional and psychological trauma that victims endure in stoic silence. Zhove is lucky to be out of physical harm's way. However, she is in continuous emotional turmoil. Her conscience gnaws at her heart over the fate of her two school-going children left behind in Mberengwa.
"I don't know what they are eating. I don't know whether they are going to school. I'm not even sure if they are still alive. I pray all the time that they are safe and that I will see them again soon.”
“I wonder sometimes whether I should have stayed with my children. If the war vets came back and killed me, at least my children would know my fate. Right now they don't even know I am here."
Broken bones heal with time if the victims are fortunate enough to access medical treatment. The verbal abuse and the psychological impact of the beatings, sexual abuse, and public humiliation will haunt these women forever. It reminds me of the ditty: "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can hurt forever." The violence inflicts deep emotional wounds among victims, their relatives, and friends.
An added repercussion is the effect that the violence is likely to have on women's participation in politics. The post-election violence reinforces long held beliefs that "politics is a dirty and dangerous pursuit that only men can dabble in.” The violence gives politics a bad name and pushes women further onto the fringes of active politics.
The majority of women targeted are political activists who openly admit they are in politics to try to ensure a better future for their children. Women polling agents and candidates who contested in local council elections are key targets. Winning female councilors in rural areas are being hounded out of their homes and therefore, being denied the chance to work and help develop their communities.
Added to these politically active victims are hundreds of women who are killed, raped, harassed, humiliated and abused simply because they are mothers, wives, sisters and aunts of prominent MDC activists.
An elderly granny who had fled her home in Kezi tells of the shame she endured during a rally when “youthful war veterans” taunted her using abusive and vulgar language because her son is an MDC activist.
She confided that how unhappy she was to be living with her daughter in-law indefinitely. "I want to be home and not get in my daughter in-law's way. But I am too afraid to go back."
Mostly women carry the heavy responsibility of explaining the horrifying events to scared, confused and traumatised children. They also try to ensure life goes on as usual for the children amid all the upheaval and uncertainty.
Mothers have to answer questions of "Baba varipi? Ubaba ungaphi? (Where is daddy?)" from children whose fathers have fled their homes in the dead of night. These women have the daunting task of trying to make senseless reprisals make sense to their children.
Women are the people who have to make sure that even after houses and granaries are razed to the ground, children are clothed and fed. Moreover, these same women live with the unspoken scorn of close relatives for “allowing” themselves to be raped by war veterans.
Yet in communities where war veterans have set up the infamous “bases” everyone knows that women have no option but to “agree” to rape in desperate attempts to protect their families.
The true extent of humiliation that violated women are enduring became clear when a man from the Midlands narrated the extent of sexual abuse in his wife's presence.
"Every woman who is still young is being raped by these brutes who threaten to destroy homesteads if women do not give in to their demands. We men, know it's happening even though women don't talk about it. We know they are desperate to spare their husbands and families victimisation. We are going to be raising children that are not ours, but AIDS is the real threat in the community now."
While the man spoke, his wife was shaking her head silently, tears streaming down her cheeks. The effect of all these experiences is to traumatise Zimbabwean women into silence, and out of the political arena.
Ultimately, to quote writer Chenjerai Hove in Shebeen Tales, there is the long term danger that if the violence, harassment and abuse continues unabated, "women will remain of politics and not in politics." And that will do liitle to make sure their needs are cared for in the future.
*Miriam Madziwa is a freelance journalist based in Zimbabwe. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Gender & Social Justice Zimbabwehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/380/48554kivuitu.jpgShailja Patel shares with Pambazuka News readers her correspondences with Samuel Kivuitu, Chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya who was at the center of the country's spiral into violence. Kivuiti's reply captures the arrogance that characterizes African leadership throughout the continent.
====At the beginning of this year, I wrote an Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu, Chair of the Electoral Commission of Kenya. It was picked up by a number of sources, online and off, within and outside Kenya, and widely distributed, forwarded, and republished.
On May 14th, Samuel Kivuitu spoke, for the first time since "The Crisis", at a forum on Post-Election Violence in Nairobi. I arrived early at the venue, and slipped a paper copy of my Open Letter under the blotter where he was going to sit. I'd abridged and updated the letter to reflect our current Kenyan reality. It ends with a plea:
It's not too late, Mr. Kivuitu. To recover your own humanity. To open your eyes to the suffering and longing of this nation. To admit that something went terribly wrong. If you could only rise to the desperate need of this turning point in Kenya's history, you could redeem yourself with the simplest of words:
"I'm sorry."
Those words might be the most revolutionary ever spoken on this continent. They might open the floodgates for every leader, every public servant, to acknowledge their own deep fear, grief, and remorse. To admit fallibility. To take responsibility.
We are still waiting, Mr. Kivuitu, for you to speak.
During the forum, I watched Mr. Kivuitu bluster, blame, deny all culpability for the stolen election that took Kenya to the brink of civil war. In the plenary, I stood up, heart pounding, and said:
Mr Kivuitu, the whole country, from IDPs (internally displaced persons) in camps to affluent residents of Karen and Mountain View, are waiting for the tiniest expression of remorse, regret, from the Electoral Commission of Kenya. As a human being, a Kenyan, can you find it in your heart to offer just three words: "We are sorry," to the people of Kenya?
He couldn't.
Five days later, this arrived in my inbox. It is posted here, and for public distribution, with Mr. Kivuitu's permission.
To: Shailja Patel [email][email protected]
From: S. M. Kivuitu [email][email protected]
Date: 19 May 2008
Dear Madam,
I thank you for your letter dated 14 May 2008 and the concerns you expressed therein.
The Holy Bible has taught me to leave judgment of others to God the Almighty. I do not know if you are the Almighty God or not but you did not seem to be Him when I saw you on 14 May 2008.
You are all the same entitled to your views. I however humbly deny any wrong doing. The laws require that I declare the winner of the presidential elections once the Commission determines the candidate who scored highest, and led 25% of votes cast in his/her favour in 5 provinces. That is all I did. And there was no other candidate or his/her agent seeking me to hold on and re tally – no. After announcing the results a fellow appeared before me and requested me to hand over to him the president's certificate. I told him that that is only done to the winner personally and directly.
The fellow then informed me that Hon. Kibaki was awaiting to be sworn as the President and the Chief Justice was present, duly robed, for the assignment. He requested me to take the certificate there. I had no business retaining the certificate. It was not mine. The law says it be given at the place the President is to be sworn. I obeyed the law and took it there. Commissioners do not count votes.
Commissioners do not tally counted results. They simply verify these. They do this through the Commissioners' senior officers whose competence and integrity you seem to recognize. Commissioners announce the results as presented to them by these officers. Or what else do you suggest they should have done?
My conscience is absolutely clear. I know how dangerous it is to delay announcing the results. There are several interests in the results and all are equally important. I was hurt in 2002 for not announcing results which I had not yet received. I am not a seer, like you seem to be, to be sure that there would have not been deaths if I postponed the announcement of the results.
With my humblest view I do not share the view that people killed others, or destroyed the properties belonging to others, on account of my announcement of the winner. I believe that irrespective of whoever of the two top candidates won, there was going to be violence. That environment was created by the politicians themselves. You seem however to worship them as deities. Secondly, I respectfully believe the killers, who had been already charged with rhetoric, reasoned thus – why did Kibaki or Kalonzo get these votes in our areas? They looked round and saw Kikuyus, Kambas and other "madoadoas" (1)(as they had been told to call them). They reasoned these where the ones who voted thus and they must eliminate them.
Even in poor Coast, suspected "wrong" voters were ordered to pronounce certain words. Once they did not do so like the locals, they were violently evicted and robbed of their properties and raped. Thus the genesis of the tragedy is in our dirty politics and negative ethnicity. It is bad luck we have kind people like you who are too naïve to realize the depth of our malaise. No wonder facile and dishonest assignments that Hassan Omar (2)advanced thrilled some of you. This confirms Kenya is in for hard time for a long while to come.
Have a nice day Ms. Patel.
S. M. Kivuitu (1) Madoadoa - spots (Kiswahili) (2) Hassan Omar Hassan, Commissioner of the Kenya National Commission for Human Rights, condemned Kivuitu and the Electoral Commission of Kenya as delinquent in their duties, at the May 14th forum on Post-Election Violence.
*Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, Shailja Patel, is a member of Kenyans for Peace With Truth and Justice. Visit her at http://www.shailja.com
*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governancehttp://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governancehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/378/48552rights.jpg Although often overlooked amidst the shocking images and stories emanating from the xenophobic attacks of the last two weeks, there is a gendered face of xenophobia, says Romi Fuller. Foreign women face the double jeopardy of belonging to and being at the intersection of two groups so vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and violence. This something the country must consider as it moves towards healing and responding to the needs of the injured and displaced.
====In the wave of xenophobic violence that swept across South Africa in the past weeks, more than 50 people have died, hundreds are injured, and thousands displaced. While media reports described the brutality of the attacks on foreign nationals – which have included people being beaten, stabbed, torched and dispossessed of their belongings and homes – there has been little consideration to the double jeopardy of being both foreign and female that renders women especially vulnerable in this deepening crisis.
While the perpetrators of the xenophobic violence in South Africa have not differentiated based on gender or age in their attacks on foreigners, there is a gender perspective to xenophobia getting lost in the midst of the horror.
Foreign women in the townships have been disproportionately affected by the recent xenophobia, not only because the violence has played out on the site of their bodies (through beatings and rape), but also because the violence has been directed towards their homes (through burning and looting).
At the same time, within South Africa’s undisputedly patriarchal society, women have also been thrust into the conflict as a real and potential source of violence between South African and foreign men. Again and again, we hear South African men accusing foreign nationals of “stealing our women.”
There have been reports of rape in the midst of the general perpetration of xenophobic violence. Systematic rape is often used as a weapon of war in “ethnic cleansing.” Although South Africa is not at war, it current situation could be considered a “conflict situation” and in a conflict situation, the sexual violation of women can erode the fabric of a community in a way that few weapons can.
Rape in conflict situations serves to dominate and tame not only the women survivors who are its immediate victims, but also all the men that are socially connected to them by delivering the message that they are not strong enough to protect their women. From this point of view, rape in war or conflict is a means of committing genocide, by destroying a particular group or nation’s identity.
In a country where sexual violence is pervasive in everyday life, it is difficult to distinguish rapes motivated by xenophobic attitudes from those perpetrated because the general atmosphere of violence and lawlessness has allowed for it. Rape can be a political tool of xenophobia; or an act of opportunistic criminal violence against a woman because of her gender, under the guise of xenophobia.
Unfortunately, though reported numbers of rape were not alarmingly high in the recent attacks, it is likely that many xenophobia-related rapes are unreported because foreign women are fearful of the police. Firstly, as foreigners in an environment where the police have a reputation for complicity in corruption, intimidation and abuse of foreigners they are mistrustful of law enforcement. Secondly, as women in a society where the victims of sexual violence are often treated with scepticism and suffer secondary victimisation, there is a general reluctance to disclose.
South African women marrying or dating foreigners may also be vulnerable to attack and sexual violence, based on xenophobia. Sexual violence is well documented in South Africa as a means to control and punish women. Men may rape South African women as a means of controlling them or curbing their agency in choosing foreign men, and as a punishment for their waywardness.
The affect in women is not just physical assault. Many foreign women have been responsible for protecting their young children from the violence, which has entailed displacement to temporary shelters or places of safety where there is insufficient access to food, blankets and sanitation.
“Woman’ (and the associated categories of wife, mother and daughter) is a social position that comes with a range of expectations and investments. Women are the traditional carers of their families, with the responsibility to feed, clothe and provide shelter for their families.
As such, xenophobia targets women and children because they are central to making settlement happen - while a host population may see migrant men as transitory, women and children denote a more permanent move and the laying down of roots.
Migrants are increasingly targeted as the scapegoats for all manner of domestic problems facing societies today, particularly unemployment, crime, and limited access to services. People perceive immigrant women – whom following gender roles tend to be responsible for their families’ well being –as taking jobs and “using and abusing” already stretched public services, such as hospitals and schools.
In reality, many migrant and refugee women in South Africa have limited employment opportunities and are often at the bottom of the labour market. Many of these women hold jobs in the informal economy or unregulated sectors. As such, their access to state services such as health, education and justice is also limited, especially if they are undocumented migrants or illegal immigrants.
Many foreign women are in South Africa after having fled conflict-zones, sexual and domestic violence, and political and/or economic repression in their home countries. The insecurity and violence they now face in South Africa compounds their trauma.
Interestingly, in her book Engendering Wartime Conflict: Women and War Trauma, Ingrid Palmary points out that women, and others, often do not see violations against women as part of political conflict, but instead tend to view them as personal or domestic violations. This means the very real possibility that leaders and service providers leave women out of reconciliation and justice mechanisms.
Although often overlooked amidst the shocking images and stories emanating from the xenophobic attacks of the last two weeks, that there is a gendered face of xenophobia is unmistakable. Foreign women face the double jeopardy of belonging to and being at the intersection of two groups so vulnerable to exploitation, abuse and violence. This something the country must consider as it moves towards healing and responding to the needs of the injured and displaced.
* Romi Fuller is the Project Manager of the Violence and Transition Project at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. This article is part of the Gender Links Opinion and Commentary Service that provides fresh views on everyday news.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Gender & Social Justice[email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governance Zimbabwehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/377/48543leaders.jpg Dieu-Donné WEDI DJAMBA argues that the march toward democracy in Africa is not only under threat by dictators using dictatorial means to stay in power, but also by democratically elected leaders who use democratic processes to cement their hold over power.
Due to the legacy of authoritarian regimes, the Global South is facing a challenge in establishing the Rule of Law. But what raises concerns is that there is a trend toward disregarding pillars of the Rule of Law such as the Constitution or free and fair elections by those who currently rule their respective countries soon after being democratically elected.
Instead of being implemented, the Rule of Law moves one step forward and two steps back, holding back society through anti-democratic practices such as electoral fraud, the violation or the review of the Constitution by the democratic elected leaders.
1. ELECTORAL FRAUD
Change of governments and those in poweris one of the characteristics of democracy and this has to be done through free and fair elections.
With different authoritarian regimes, the Global South witnessed several so-called presidential elections with either a single candidate or many candidates without any chance of winning. An example is Chad where in the 2006 presidential elections; the president was re-elected with ninety nine percent. In Zaire(currently DRC) during Mobutu’s time or in Togo where as the world watched, a military government adopted the façade of democracy. There is the other kind of electoral fraud such as presidential elections in Zimbabwe.
But, if the mass frauds during these elections are organised by those who originally came into power by an anti -democratic way (coup, rebellion, revolution) and try to maintain themselves in power through so-called elections, the Global South faces a new challenge where the democratically elected leaders who once in power do not hesitate to use any illegal practice in order to win elections. The leading maxim seems to be “As I am now here it is forever.”
In this regard. The recent Kenyan crisis is a loud example of the attempt to hold back the Rule of Law by a democratic elected leader.
Indeed Kenya was deeply affected by a bloody crisis that left more than one thousand killed and thousands displaced, churches, shops and houses burned, all caused of an electoral coup by president Mwai Kibaki who came in power in 2002 after democratic elections that ended the long authoritarian regime started with Jomo Kenyatta in 1963 and continued by Daniel Arap Moi in 1978. These last elections took Kenya five years.
2. THE VIOLATION OR REVIEW OF THE CONSTITUTION
As it is well known, in the authoritarian regime, the leader designs the Constitution to meet his political needs.
Unfortunately this practice is becoming more and more prelevant amongst leaders who were democratically. Indeed, in the Global South, the Constitution, one of the pillars of the Rule of Law is coveted by those who have the duty to protect it.
In this regard, last February 2008 the Global South witnessed the violation of the Constitution by the Congolese president democratically elected Joseph Kabila and the prime minister Antoine Gizega who appointed magistrates in violation of the Congolese Constitution .
But the threat is also found in the review of the Constitution which aims to increase the power of the Head of the State or to allow him to remain in power through unlimited terms.
Furthermore, there is currently an attempt to review the Constitution by the dictator of Cameroon Paul Biya the one who has been in power since 1984. The review aims to allow him to be candidate in the next lections. Let us hope he will not succeed. Indeed, despite the fact Biya’s authoritarianism, the people of Cameroon are offering a real opposition to the review of the Constitution.
But the attempt to change the Constitution is not only made by the authoritarian leaders such as Paul Biya in Cameroon, but also by those democratically elected in their respective countries. The review of Constitution was attempted in Nigeria by the now former president Olusegun Obasanjo who tried through Parliament to review the provision limiting the number of terms a president may serve. He failed because the majority in Parliament voted against the amendment.
In addition, the same attempt was made by the current president of Venezuela Hugo Chavez. But contrary to the Nigerian president the president of Venezuela tried to increase his power through a referendum, but still fortunately - he failed.
CONCLUSION
The establishment of the Rule of Law is one of major challenges in the Global South. Unfortunately, while people are focused on achieving this noble objective, others are working to hold back the process.
Therefore, there is a need for the Civil society as a whole to intesify its watch dog role vis-à-vis not only where the Rule of Law still has to be established but also where it has already been established. Indeed, today the Rule of Law is threatened in the DRC, Kenya, Venezuela and Nigeria. Tomorrow may be under threat in other countries.
As the Global South is struggling to end the culture of presidents for life, the slogan “as I am now here it is forever” has to be banned because it is taking the march toward a Rule of Law in the Global South two steps back for every step forward. The end result is gross human rights violations.
*Dieu-Donné WEDI DJAMBA is a lawyer(Advocate) at the Lubumbashi Bar Association a Researcher in Transitional Justice and an Assistant Lecturer in the College of Law in Lubumbashi in the DRC.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governance
Kola Ibrahim looks at the legacy of Fidel Castro, the internationalization of struggle and calls for “working class activists from Kenya to Venezuela to Georgia to Pakistan and the rest of the world – to build a genuine working people’s political platform.” This year, an ailing but still going Fidel Castro will turn 82.
Tagged under Global Pan-Africanism Fidel Castrohttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/376/48442map.jpgChina has great strategic interests in Africa, and Africa will benefit from a continued strengthening of its cooperation with China, says Peter Bosshard. Such South-South cooperation will promote growth and much-needed investment. However, economic growth should not come at the cost of environmental destruction. China has a self-interest in strengthening the rules on the social and environmental impacts of its overseas projects. African governments can learn from China’s experience by being selective in the types of investments which they invite, and by making sure that investments do not undermine the long-term environmental foundations of growth and prosperity.
China and Africa have rapidly expanded their political and economic relations since the turn of the century. China – ‘the world’s factory’ – is trying to secure access to resources in Africa which it lacks at home. Africa also offers a welcome market for Chinese companies facing stiff competition at home. The Chinese state supports this investment in African resources and creation of jobs to stave off the country’s permanent unemployment crisis.
Africa has for a long time been a primary source of natural resources for the European and American markets. China’s strategy is to access resources which have so far not been exploited because they were considered by Western companies to be too small, remote or politically risky. This strategy requires massive investment in mines, oil exploration and auxiliary infrastructure such as pipelines, roads, railways, power plants and transmission lines.
China’s economic expansion in Africa is carried forward by thousands of individual entrepreneurs, a small number of large, state-owned enterprises, and a host of companies owned by provincial and municipal authorities. While small private enterprises dominate investment in commerce and manufacturing, state-owned enterprises typically invest in extractive and infrastructure projects. In integrated investment packages, government institutions and state-owned companies work closely together. The Chinese government’s active involvement in resource extraction is not fundamentally different from the financial, political and military support granted to oil and mining operations by the US, French or South African governments.
The Chinese government does not directly interfere in the investment decisions of the enterprises it owns, but offers support and incentives in the form of finance and diplomatic support. China Exim Bank is a key source of finance for the Africa projects of state-owned enterprises. The Chinese export credit agency was created in 1994 to promote Chinese exports. With new loan approvals of $36 billion, China Exim Bank outgrew the World Bank and all other export credit agencies in 2007. In May 2007, China Exim Bank pledged to commit approximately $20 billion for loans to Africa over the next three years [1]. In comparison, the World Bank approved projects for $4.8 billion for Africa in 2006.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF CHINA’S EXPANSION IN AFRICA
Rapidly growing economic ties with China have contributed to Africa’s strong economic growth in recent years [2]. As a developing country, China can offer experiences and goods that are better suited to the needs of African societies than the advice and products from industrialised countries. For example, China is a world leader in renewable energy technologies, which are essential for rural electrification in Africa. Chinese investment and consumer goods are usually more affordable than Western products. Finally, Chinese loans and aid flows allow African governments to eschew the often dogmatic economic policy conditions of international financial institutions. However, the primary focus of China’s Africa strategy is not on exporting appropriate technologies but on accessing raw materials. It mirrors what has been the dominant approach of Western governments and corporations to Africa’s development for many decades.
Civil society and academic observers have expressed concerns about the impacts of China’s economic expansion on Africa’s governance, human rights, environment, local employment and labour conditions, product quality, and the sustainability of the continent’s debt burden. This paper focuses on the environmental impacts [3]. Concerns over China’s environmental footprint in Africa have arisen for at least four reasons:
- China’s investments in Africa are concentrated in sectors which are environmentally sensitive (such as oil and gas exploration, mining, hydropower, and timber), and in infrastructure projects which help to facilitate environmentally sensitive investments (such as roads, railway and transmission lines).
- While investments in the mining, oil, gas, hydropower and timber sectors generally carry high environmental risks, China’s strategy of making previously inaccessible resources accessible compounds these risks. Chinese investors are developing projects in remote, ecologically fragile regions, in areas that have so far been protected as national parks, and in countries with weak governance structures.
- China’s domestic policies have prioritised economic growth over the protection of the environment, with harrowing results. The Chinese government has set in place laws, regulations and institutions to protect the environment, but with limited success [4]. China risks exporting its domestic environmental track record to other parts of the world through its foreign investment strategy.
- International financial institutions have since the 1990s adopted environmental guidelines and standards to address the environmental impacts of their projects. Major Chinese investors, financiers and equipment suppliers have so far not adopted such standards, or have developed policies which are not necessarily in line with international standards.
Some high-profile examples illustrate the risks created by Chinese investments for Africa’s environment. In Sudan, China Exim Bank is financing the large Merowe Dam Project on the Nile. The dam’s reservoir will displace more than 55,000 people from the fertile Nile Valley to arid desert locations. In violation of Sudan’s environmental law, the project’s superficial environmental impact assessment has never been approved by the Ministry of Environment.
In Gabon, Sinopec explored for oil in Loango National Park until the country’s national park service ordered exploration to stop in September 2006 [5]. Conservation groups had pointed out that oil exploration threatened rare plants and animals, and the environmental impact study had not been approved by the environment ministry. China’s Kongou Dam, which has been proposed to power the Belinga iron ore project in Gabon, could negatively impact the forests of the Ivindo National Park. Sinohydro’s Bui Dam, a project being financed by China Exim Bank, will flood about a quarter of Bui National Park in Ghana. The Lower Kafue Gorge Dam, a Sinhoydro project being financed by China Exim Bank in Zambia, will put additional pressure on the ecologically important Kafue Flats and its national parks.
AFRICAN AND WESTERN REACTIONS TO CHINA’S ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT
African governments of all political stripes have strongly welcomed China’s growing presence on the continent. They have expressed appreciation not only for the economic boost triggered by Chinese investment, but also for the pragmatic and speedy way in which China has delivered aid projects, often irrespective of concerns over corruption and environmental impacts. Sahr Johnny, Sierra Leone’s ambassador to China, summarised a meeting with Chinese investors in 2005 as follows:
‘The Chinese are doing more than the G8 to make poverty history. If a G8 country had wanted to rebuild the stadium, we’d still be holding meetings! The Chinese just come and do it. They don’t hold meetings about environmental impact assessment, human rights, bad governance and good governance. I’m not saying it’s right, just that Chinese investment is succeeding because they don’t set high benchmarks' [6].
African governments have expressed concerns when cheap Chinese investors wiped out local textile (and other) industries, preferred Chinese over African workers, or did not comply with local labour laws. Very few concerns have been recorded regarding the environmental impacts of Chinese investments. In January 2008, Sierra Leone banned timber exports because, as the country’s environment minister said in an interview with the BBC, Chinese and other logging companies were plundering forests with no respect for the law [7]. And a task force of the African Union urged all actors in September 2006 to ‘[e]nsure that China pays more attention to the protection of the environment in its investment practices’ [8].
Since the 1980s, multilateral development banks have adopted safeguard policies that address the social and environmental impacts of their projects. Western financiers are concerned that Chinese banks will take up projects that they rejected because of unacceptable environmental risks. There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that borrowing governments use the availability of Chinese funding to pressure other financiers to weaken their environmental standards, or to flout them in specific projects.
In October 2006, then World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz warned:
‘Almost 80 per cent of the world’s commercial banks respect [the Equator Principles] when they finance projects. The large Chinese banks do not apply them. True, they are relatively new to this type of activity in Africa. But they should not make the same mistakes which France and the United States have made in Mobutu’s Zaire… Let’s be honest, this would be terrible, a true scandal [9]."
Around the same time, Philippe Maystadt, the President of the European Investment Bank, criticised Chinese financiers even more bluntly. ‘The competition of the Chinese banks is clear’, Maystadt said according to the Financial Times. ‘They don’t bother about social or human rights conditions.’ The EIB President claimed that Chinese banks had snatched projects from under his bank’s nose in Africa and Asia, after offering to undercut EIB conditions on labour standards and the environment [10].
Maystadt and others recommend that international financial institutions should lower their own standards in response to Chinese competition. The EIB President argued that international financial institutions needed to avoid ‘excessive’ conditions, and had to ‘think about the degree of conditionality we want to impose' [11]. The Chinese financiers’ lack of stringent environmental standards may not only cause serious environmental impacts in specific projects, but also trigger a broader race to the bottom regarding the environmental standards of financial institutions.
EVOLVING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES
China’s traditional response to concerns about the environmental impacts of overseas projects is that China does not interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries. China’s African Policy of January 2006 stresses that China ‘respects African countries’ independent choice of the road of development’, and will ‘increase assistance to African nations with no political strings attached’ [12]. In response to Paul Wolfowitz’s accusation that China was undermining environmental standards, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson maintained in October 2006:
‘China has adopted the principle of non-interference of other nations’ internal affairs in its foreign relations. China does not accept any country imposing its values, social systems and ideology upon China. Neither will China allow itself to do so to others' [13].
The reality of China’s foreign policy is more complex than public announcements indicate, and has evolved over time. After a string of riots in African countries, the Chinese government seems to be increasingly aware that human rights abuses and environmental destruction in Chinese projects can trigger an unacceptable backlash. President Hu Jintao for example repeatedly urged Chinese businesses to respect local laws during his visit to Africa in February 2007.
Government concerns over the impacts of overseas investments have triggered a series of guidelines regarding workers’ rights, product safety, community relations, and environmental impacts in such projects. In August 2006, the Ministry of Commerce issued recommendations for improving the safety of workers in Chinese overseas investments. It urged Chinese companies to hire local workers, respect local customs and adhere to international safety standards in their projects. The recommendations argue that doing so will serve China’s national interest [14].
In October 2006, the State Council, China’s highest government body, issued nine principles regulating foreign investments of Chinese companies. Among other things, the Council called on Chinese investors to ‘fulfill the necessary social responsibility to protect the legitimate rights and interests of local employees, pay attention to environmental resource protection, care and support of the local community and people’s livelihood cause’, and to ‘preserve our good image and a good corporate reputation’ [15].
China Exim Bank was an early example of China’s effort to adopt environmental guidelines. The bank adopted an environmental policy in November 2004, and made it publicly available in April 2007. The policy states that ‘projects that are harmful to the environment or do not gain endorsement or approval from environmental administration will not be funded’. It stipulates that ‘once any unacceptable negative environmental impacts result during the project implementation, China Exim Bank will require the implementation unit to take immediate remedial or preventive measures. Otherwise, they will discontinue financial support' [16].
In August 2007, China Exim Bank issued more specific guidelines on social and environmental impact assessment. The guidelines require projects to comply with host country policies – but not international standards – regarding environmental assessment, resettlement and consultation. They stipulate an active role for China Exim Bank in monitoring environmental impacts throughout the project cycle, and reserve the right to cancel a loan if environmental impacts are not adequately addressed [17]. Observers agree that China Exim Bank is interested in international good practice in environmental assessment, but does not accept any political obligation to endorse standards drawn up by other bodies.
FROM GUIDANCE TO IMPLEMENTATION
Guidelines indicate the political intentions of the Chinese government, yet compliance is not mandatory. The central government still owns more than 150 large companies but has little control over their day-to-day operations. It has even less influence over the numerous provincial, municipal and private Chinese enterprises which are currently exploring Africa [18]. As a result, there are countless examples of Chinese investments in Africa which contradict the government appeals for a harmonious society and the tenets of corporate social responsibility.
In recent years, Chinese government agencies have created strong incentives for companies to comply with the country’s environmental laws and guidelines. In August 2007, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA, now Ministry of Environmental Protection or MEP), the People’s Bank of China and the China Banking Regulatory Commission jointly prepared a green credit policy. Under this policy, ‘banks will be stricter about lending to companies that do not pass environmental assessments or fail to implement environment-protection regulations’ [19]. In November 2007, 12 Chinese companies for the first time were withheld loans under the green credit policy.
In October 2007, SEPA and Ministry of Commerce announced that they would ban companies which were found seriously violating environmental rules from exporting for up to three years [20]. And in January 2008, SEPA signed a deal with the International Finance Corporation to introduce the Equator Principles – the environmental standards of international private banks – in China [21].
None of the measures adopted by SEPA and other agencies explicitly refer to the environmental track record of Chinese overseas investors. They may even encourage domestic producers to relocate their most polluting operations abroad. Yet if the political will exists, all these measures can be used to strengthen the global environmental performance of Chinese companies.
EXPORTING CHINA’S DOMESTIC EXPERIENCE
Like every government, China tends to export its own development model through its aid and foreign economic policy. Chinese authorities have for example invited several African delegations to visit the Three Gorges Dam as a model for the continent’s energy sector development.
In recent years, the horrendous cost of the Chinese development model to the environment, public health and ultimately the economy has become evident. In 2007 the World Bank documented the alarming price which China pays for its air and water pollution. The Three Gorges Project in particular can no longer serve as an argument for putting growth before the environment. In September 2007, Chinese experts warned that the hydropower dam could ‘lead to [an environmental] catastrophe’ and that ‘the problems are all more serious than we expected’ [22].
Over the years, the Chinese government has taken strong measures to address the alarming environmental destruction. It banned logging in old-growth forests in 1998, strengthened the water law in 2002, adopted a strict law on environmental impact assessment in 2003, and ensured public participation in such impact assessments in 2006. The green credit policy and other measures adopted by SEPA provide the teeth which will enforce stricter compliance of domestic polluters with environmental regulations.
The guidelines adopted by the State Council, the Ministry of Commerce, China Exim Bank and other agencies indicate that China intends to address the environmental footprint of Chinese companies overseas. Yet as happened in Western countries, stricter environmental regulations at home may also motivate Chinese companies to move their polluting operations abroad. This creates risks for regions with weak environmental regulations and enforcement capacities such as Africa.
In September 2007, South Africa’s Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka announced that her government was talking with China about moving polluting Chinese companies to South Africa. ‘China needs to send some of its polluting industries elsewhere because it is choking on them’, Mlambo-Ngcuka said. ‘We have the capacity to manage emissions and want to regulate that agreement' [23]. The announcement is reminiscent of a memorandum in 1991 in which the World Bank’s chief economist Lawrence Summers argued that ‘under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted’, and that the World Bank should be ‘encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the [Less Developed Countries]' [24].
CONCLUSION
China has great strategic interests in Africa, and Africa will benefit from a continued strengthening of its cooperation with China. Such South-South cooperation will promote growth and much-needed investment. However, as China’s domestic experience demonstrates, economic growth should not come at the cost of environmental destruction. As a long-term partner in Africa’s development, China has a self-interest in strengthening the rules on the social and environmental impacts of its overseas projects. China has begun the process of establishing guidelines for overseas investments. Given the speed of its global expansion, these guidelines will need to become more comprehensive, and deepened through binding regulations.
African governments can learn from China’s experience by being selective in the types of investments which they invite, and by making sure that investments do not undermine the long-term environmental foundations of growth and prosperity. Africa’s civil society is taking an active interest in China’s role in the continent, and will continue to monitor the sustainability of Chinese investments.
Western governments will become more credible in expressing concerns regarding the environment and good governance if they uphold and strengthen the standards ruling their own overseas investments. They will need to accept their primary responsibility for addressing global environmental impacts. They should do more to promote standards and technologies which can help reduce emissions at home, in China and in other countries which are currently catching up with Western consumer societies.
*Peter Bosshard is the Policy Director of International Rivers in Berkeley, USA. He coordinates a programme to strengthen the environmental standards of Chinese overseas investments. A longer version of this text is available, in English and Chinese, at
*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
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Tagged under Land & EnvironmentSavo Heleta looks at the ways death tolls are manipulated for political ends and argues the same could be happening in Darfur.
The conflict in Darfur, now in its sixth year, is for a long time one of the prime news around the world. Other conflicts come and go, but Darfur is receiving extensive coverage ever since the American government officials called the conflict genocide in the late 2004.
The fighting in Darfur broke out in 2003, when two rebel groups took up arms against the Sudanese government forces. The rebels, who came from predominantly "African" sedentary tribes, blamed political, economic, and social marginalization and neglect of the region by the "Arab" dominated government of Sudan as the main causes of rebellion in Darfur, the vast western Sudanese province the size of France.
Soon after the rebellion began, the Sudanese government mobilized and armed local militias from Darfur's Arab ethnic groups, called Janjaweed, particularly those without traditional land rights, to fight against the "African" rebels. The Janjaweed are believed to be behind the worst atrocities against civilians in Darfur.
Referring to a 2006 estimate by the World Health Organization, the Western media, politicians, and international humanitarian organizations claim that more than 200,000 people have died in Darfur since 2003. Out of these 200,000 victims, the World Health Organization estimates that about 20% people died from fighting and violence, while 80% died from starvation and diseases. It is estimated that over 2 million people are living in refugee camps in Darfur and neighboring countries after fleeing their homes.
Some organizations, such as the American advocacy group Save Darfur Coalition and the Washington-based and the United States State Department-funded Center for International Justice claimed, without any evidence, that over 400,000 people have died in Darfur.
Recently, John Holmes, a senior United Nations official in charge of humanitarian relief, announced that as many as 300,000 people could have died in the Darfur conflict. Holmes said that the 300,000 total "is not a very scientifically based figure," but a "reasonable hypothesis and extrapolation" from the earlier estimate of 200,000.
Why are these Darfur death toll estimates taken for granted by so many people, media, and organizations in the West? How reliable are these numbers, considering that humanitarian workers, the main source of data used to come up with the estimates, have had only limited access to many areas in Darfur since the conflict began in 2003? Could the death toll be inflated? Would someone purposely exaggerate the numbers?
The Western media, aid agencies, and advocacy groups have exaggerated numbers of war victims around the world on many occasions before.
During the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, the international aid agencies, the United Nations officials, and the Western diplomats and media had claimed that between 200,000 and 300,000 people had lost their lives in fighting that ravaged the country for four years. The widely accepted figure that almost no one questioned was at least 200,000 dead. The international community and Bosnian politicians had used these numbers for their own purposes all the way until early 2007, when an independent Research and Documentation Center from Bosnia and Herzegovina, after three years of extensive and nonpartisan work, revealed that 100,000 people, civilians and soldiers on all sides, had died in the war. They collected over twenty different facts about each victim, such as people's names, nationality, time and place of birth and death, and circumstances of death.
The Bosnian death toll of 100,000 people is an enormous tragedy, but still it is not the same as 200,000 or 300,000 dead. The aid agencies that came up with the inflated death toll in Bosnia never publicly commented on their exaggeration. The Western media kept quiet or only briefly reported about the new findings. No one has ever apologized for the overstated numbers used for about 15 years. People in Darfur need help. Their suffering and misery should not be used for political campaigning around the world.
Darfur urgently needs peace through a negotiated settlement that can effectively tackle political, social, and economic marginalization of the region, first by the British colonial government and later by the successive post-independence governments of Sudan.
Numbers currently used to portray the death toll in Darfur may be correct. Yet, knowing the record of the international aid agencies, the Western governments and media, and various advocacy groups, it should not come as a surprise if the current estimate of 300,000 dead was exaggerated to serve some hidden purposes outside Darfur.
* Savo Heleta is the author of Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia (AMACOM, March 2008) and a postgraduate student in Conflict Transformation and Management at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
**Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governancehttp://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/376/48440china.jpgChina’s media and official reaction to the devastating Sichuan earthquake has been given generally positive coverage by Western media and governments, writes Stephen Marks. It may be a coincidence, but the earthquake and the allegedly more open reaction happen to follow soon after the coming into force of sweeping new Chinese government regulations on transparency - which could be a useful lever for activists seeking greater transparency in tracking the impact of China’s African footprint.
China’s media and official reaction to the devastating Sichuan earthquake has been given generally positive coverage by Western media and governments - both by contrast with the Burmese military junta’s handling of the recent floods, and also with Beijing’s reaction to previous natural disasters.
The Shanghai-based blog reviews and discusses the generally favourable global and Western reaction.
It may be a coincidence, but the earthquake and the allegedly more open reaction happen to follow soon after the coming into force of sweeping new Chinese government regulations on transparency - which could be a useful lever for activists seeking greater transparency in tracking the impact of China’s African footprint.
May 1 saw the entry into force of the Measures on Open Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation), issued by China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection. According to Ma Jun, Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Chinese environmental NGO, ‘the measures require environment agencies to disclose 17 different kinds of environmental information, including regional environmental quality, amounts of discharge and the records of polluters in various regions’.
The categories of information which the new measures require to be made available to the public include:
- A list of enterprises violating discharge standards or exceeding discharge quota limits;
- Letters, visits and complaints filed about pollution caused by enterprises; and the result of their disposal;
-Administrative punishments, reviews, lawsuits and enforcement;
- A list of enterprises causing major and extremely large pollution accidents and incidents;
- Enterprises that refuse to comply with the effective administrative punishment decisions.
Enterprises listed for environmental violations must publish detailed discharge data within 30 days, on pain of a fine, and members of the public have a legal right to require environmental agencies to publish the list of polluting firms.
In addition, enterprises are encouraged to publish a much wider range of information regarding their environmental impact, and firms agreeing to do so will be rewarded with priority in the allocation of contracts for government-funded environmental projects.
All of which dovetails significantly with the conclusions reached last month in Nairobi at a strategy meeting of some 20 civil society activists and researchers from across Africa organised by Fahamu to discuss China’s growing African involvement.
A central theme to emerge from the meeting was the lack of direct links between Chinese and African civil society; While most African civil society groups are not explicitly concerned with China (and vice-versa) they are very much concerned with issues with a strong China dimension, and high on that list are issues connected with the environment.
Could African civil society groups pressure Chinese companies in Africa to raise their game, in ways which Chinese activists could use as leverage back home? This possibility might well be reversed if the new Chinese regulations prove to have teeth - African campaigners could press Chinese firms to be as open in Africa as they may yet be required to be in China.
The Chinese Government has a declared policy that where local laws are lacking or deficient, Chinese companies should abide by the relevant Chinese legislation. So participants at the Nairobi meeting agreed that better knowledge of China's own domestic laws, both on environmental regulation and on issues of employee rights and broader social responsibility, would help.
If the new regulations on disclosure prove to have teeth they could prove a useful basis for closer co-operation between environmental activists in China and in Africa. But how effective are the new rules likely to prove in practice?
As Ma Jun points out ‘It is well-known that there is weak enforcement of laws and regulations in China. As a law that reflects new thinking, the implementation of the measures is expected to be even more challenging’.
On the plus side, the regulations are launched by the energetic and radical Environment Minister Pan Yue whose State Environmental Protection Administration [SEPA] has since the last Party Congress, been officially retitled and promoted to the status of Ministry of Environmental Protection [MEP].
Pan Yue is on record as connecting China’s environmental crisis with the uncritical adoption of Western capitalist models of industrialisation, and the consequent widening of .
So it is not surprising that his Ministry was among the first to issue .
Which brings us back to the issue of government and media reaction to the earthquake crisis. Some of the positive Western comment has explicitly linked the greater openness about the scale of the disaster and even of inadequacies in the response, to the new directives on openness - Financial Times reported last week that:
‘In spite of wall-to-wall coverage of the earthquake in Sichuan province, the ruling Communist Party has been working hard to shape the news.
'A meeting of the party’s most powerful propaganda officials on Tuesday stressed the importance of “correct guidance of public opinion” and ordered a strengthening of political consciousness among journalists.
'All frontline coverage of the disaster should “uphold unity and encourage stability” while “giving precedence to positive propaganda”, ordered Li Changchun, a member of the party’s supreme Politburo standing committee, the People’s Daily reported.’
Just what these central edicts will mean in practice is still not clear. In the same issue of the Financial Times Mure Dickie analysed the implications in a piece headed China Media Project [CMP] at Hong Kong University reports that:
‘CMP has confirmed with sources inside China’s media that the CCP’s Central Propaganda Department (...) has issued “numerous” directives on coverage of the Sichuan earthquake, including a directive against “critical reporting” on the disaster. The general atmosphere for coverage, however, seems to remain relatively open. While media have been instructed to follow the lead of central party media – Xinhua News Agency, CCTV and company – regional commercial media can and are, for the moment, pursuing the story with intensity.’
CMP illustrates the point with a comparison of the coverage in the official Xinhuanet, site of the official Xinhua news agency, and Caijing, the leading independent business and current affairs magazine.
So where does that leave us? Central government agencies that issue commendable regulations, which will not be implemented by sluggish and self-interested officials unless, perhaps, they are forced to by energetic popular pressure. And politicians who encourage press openness - as long as it is ‘positive’ and avoids ‘irresponsible sensationalism’.
Sound familiar? Clearly Chinese and African civil society activists will have a lot of common experiences to share in future.
*Stephen Marks is research associate with Fahamu.
**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Global South & Transnational StrugglesVincent Munié looks at France's strategies and machinations in the Central African Republic.
Buried deep in the mixed-bag of the November 19 2007 presidential agenda, a meeting took place between Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Bozizé of the Central African Republic (CAR). The secrecy and brevity of the encounter (27 minutes) belies a certain degree of discomfort. In fact, CAR is by no means an insignificant country to France.
CAR attained independence in 1960 from its former colonial master after decades of exploitation, but this did not diminish France’s political and military influence. Why then, was this meeting so quietly and hurriedly held? It appears that a chasm has opened between France and CAR.
At the beginning of 2007, relations between the two countries seemed normal. In the spring, Birao, the capital city of the Vakaga region which lies in the far north-east on the border with Chad and Sudan’s Darfur, briefly hit the headlines. In the same period, France was in the midst of an electoral campaign period, and consequently, there was little media focus on what role the French military was playing in this strategic region. And yet, on the 4th of March, in the first such campaign since Kolwezi in 1978, the French carried out an aerial assault on Birao, which had been under attack from the rebel Union of Democratic Forces for Unity (UDFU).
This new rebel force was formed in September of 2006 and brought together three armed groups composed of disillusioned ex-comrades of Bozizé, former officers who had served under ex-president Ange-Felix Patassé, and soldiers disgruntled with their pay. The Central African rebellion is a heterogeneous one; The movements oscillate between a Pro-Patassé political stance and a criminal tendency. However in order to understand the attack of 4 March, 2007, one must track back to November 2006, when a force of 50-odd men first seized control of Birao and several other areas of the North-East (Sam Oandja, Ouanda Djalle, etc.).
It took a month for the Central African army, supported by Bangui-based French troops and F1 Mirage fighter jets from N’Djamena to repulse the rebels toward Chad and Sudan. The tension was palpable. This is despite the fact that in February of the same year, a peace accord was signed in Sirte, Libya, between President Bozizé and Abdoulaye Miskine, on behalf of the UDFU. On the ground the rebels under the new leadership of Damane Zacharia dismissed the accord.
SOLDIERS RUNNING AMOK
At the beginning of March, Daman Zacharia announced a second assault on Birao. He declared that he was taking on the French, for what he saw as their interference in national matters. Since November 2006, France had maintained a small Special Force detachment of 128 in Birao. On the night of 3rd March, this force came under heavy artillery fire.
Two Mirage F1 fighter jets dispatched from Chad quickly destroyed the artillery nests. The following night, 50 troops from the 3rd Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment were dispatched form Bangui to a small airstrip 12 km from Birao to setup a launch-point for Transall and Hercules carriers bringing in troops from Central Africa and about one hundred French legionnaires. The Central African Army, with the manpower and logistical support from the French, were thus able to regain control of the town and its surrounds.
Zacharia and his forces were headed for Bangui, and were it not for Paris, the government of Bozizé would have fallen. The Central African conflicts are seen as wars of the poor. The UDFU has never had more than 500 combatants, while the national army has 5000 men, of which the fighting force is less than 2000. For a country size of France, this is very small.
After the March conflagration, Birao was left in ruins: 70% of houses were burnt and looted. There were very few civilian casualties given that all the town’s inhabitants had sought refuge in the bush. However, the destruction of the millet reserves, just before the onset of the rainy season, portends a certain famine for an impoverished population that is totally dependent on its meager agriculture production.
Although all parties deny responsibility, its seems that the national army bears a huge culpability for the pillage. In this forgotten part of a forgotten country the military once again has the dubious distinction of turning on its own citizens. The soldiers in Central Africa seem to be out of control. The terror metered out by the army in the North West is a major cause of the insecurity in the area. Of particular concern is the presence of the ubiquitous dreaded presidential guard – drawn from “ex-freedom fighters who were brought in from Chad to bolster Bozizé’s coup in 2003.
There have been massacres, rape, torture and looting… all perpetrated under the guise of fighting the rebel group Armée Populaire pour la Restauration de la République et de la démocratie (APRD), the country’s second rebellion. The presidential guard has launched several attacks on the civilian population. The national army (formed by France) is responsible for the massive displacement of citizens (200,000 displaced in the North-West).
Clearly, France would not gain from attention on its involvement in CAR. However, the national army has become a dubious ally. There were several calls from the French Foreign Ministry over the summer, urging the CAR government to rebuild confidence between the army and the citizenry. At the beginning of November 2007, Bozizé himself acknowledged the atrocities and took symbolic measures. He invited the rebel groups to the negotiating table. Their demands, put forward primarily by the Central African People’s Liberation Movement (MLPC) of former Prime Minister Martin Ziguélé, revolve around the disputed 2005 elections, army atrocities and the mismanagement of economic reforms.
France still does not seem ready to cut its ex-colony loose. Under a 1960 defence accord, France is obligated to intervene in the event of foreign aggression. The current rebellion is, however, of local origin – and not orchestrated by Khartoum, as has been suggested in official circles. France’s presence in the region has taken on an “unquestionable” character. The March military operation is but a symptom of a much bigger problem.
MUTINIES AND SHENANIGANS
After a brutal colonization of the Oubangi-Chari, the first “French” town, Bangui, was established in 1889. Independence did not end French patronage, making CAR a textbook example of what is referred to as “Franco-Africa”. After the “fortuitous” death of the republic’s founder Barthélémy Boganda, France has always systematically maintained a firm grip on power by propping up and deposing its protégés; David Dacko was twice installed and deposed, Jean-Bedel Bokassa proclaimed himself emperor and was overthrown by France in Operation Barracuda, André Kolingba set up a military regime, Felix Patassé was the first “democratically-elected” president, and the latest in line is Bozizé.
In a review of the cooperation, the two permanent bases of Bouar and Bangui were closed in 1998, following the “mutinies” of 1996 during which French soldiers seized control of the capital. In 2002 an operations centre consisting in part of the Special Operations Command (COS), was set up through Operation Boali… Another sign of France’s continued influence is the presence of General Henri-Alain Guillou as presidential military advisor, along with about 60 other officials in various ministries.
Whereas CAR has been relatively untouched by the systematic industrial depredation suffered by its neighbours, its central position on the continent fits in with France’s political and economic strategy. In the course of the last fifty years, CAR has secretly become a feeding-trough. The sustained lawlessness has favoured the wanton extraction of minerals, precious stones and illegal ivory trade. The 1979 diamond affair is just a tip of the massive iceberg that is the exploitation and expatriation of gold and diamonds by French businessmen. The same has been true for the rapacious exploitation of timber and rubber resources through concessions given to individuals engaged in tropical misadventures. The Kolingba (1982-1993) and Patassé (1993-2003) regimes have followed on in the same style.
France has more or less maintained some military presence in CAR since independence, and at the same time exercises the same political patronage as in the rest of the sub-region. An important part of this presence is France’s ability to monitor the neighbouring countries. In addition, France has always favoured Africa as a military training ground. So far, France has been able to prevail militarily, given that none have taken on a terrorist character as has happened in the Middle East. The hand of France has also been clearly seen in African politics, as was the case in Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire.
The French media also has a significant part to play: on 14 July 2007, France 2 carried a rare report on CAR that glorified the role of French troops in the Birao rebellion, without addressing the question as to why France was there in the first place, the root causes of the rebellion, the state of the country, or even the atrocities committed by the CAR army.
It is true that the CAR crises do not constitute an all-out war or a humanitarian crisis of the kind that stirs up international attention or emotions. At the same time the country continues to suffer silently in grinding poverty. The Human Development Index list CAR as the 5th –poorest country. The state is practically non-existent outside the capital, hardly giving any assistance to a population left to its devices. In January 2008, civil servants went on strike to demand salary arrears. On 18 January, the prime minister resigned. Since 1960 the country has been yoked with leaders chosen more for their obsequiousness than their managerial acumen. As a result the CAR has been impoverished, hence justifying the need for “aid” – military, economic and political.
Bozizé did however deign to take liberties against his colonial master and protector. In April 2007, the government suddenly decided to nationalize the petroleum sector, in the process excluding Total, which until that point had been the major shareholder in SOGAL, the hydrocarbon management company. Further still, the president’s nephew Sylvain, Ndoutingaye, minister for mines, was given the economy portfolio, against the advice of Sarkozy and the World Bank. Strict financial conditions were also imposed on Areva’s exploitation of the Bakouma mine. Areva had recently acquired Uramin, the Canadian company that held uranium-mining concessions in CAR. The final act of defiance was Bozizé’s visit to Omar El-Bashir, his Sudanese counterpart, despite France’s disapproval.
At the same time France has been accused of ties to a “rogue regime” thanks to its links with the national army. Despite efforts at transparency, the national army remains largely unaccountable, given that officers accused of crimes are simply dismissed without charges. The heralded national dialogue remains an illusory promise. Although diplomatic pressure has been brought to bear, France withdrawing its troops would be the key factor. Only a couple of military advisers were withdrawn this summer. South African diplomats however continue to work in the corridors of power. A peace accord was signed in March when Thabo Mbeki quietly visited Bangui. As a result of this visit, the presidential guard was placed under the tutelage of thirty South African military instructors. At the end of the day, the stakes are rising in the race to take over patronage of CAR.
The CAR revolt is not an isolated case. Chad’s Idriss Déby showed an independent streak in the Zoe’s Arch saga. Niger’s president Mamadou Tandja has been actively seeking out other economic partners. In this context, France’s traditional bilateral ties, the military cooperation and economic networks seem to be on the wane. France has subsequently insisted on the deployment of a European Union force (EUFOR), which will effectively double the number of French troops on the ground in the strategic Chad/CAR area. Their mandate remains unclear as far as Mission “Epervier” or Operation Boali are concerned, raising the likelihood of confusion.
In 2007, however, a mere military presence is not enough to guarantee France’s pre-eminence in the country. As her paratroopers and soldiers descend upon the capital and patrol its streets, they walk past the ruins of the Sports stadium, where Bokassa was enthroned. This gift from the Giscard-d’Estaing regime, continues to crumble and decay by the day, while a mere forty metres away rises the city’s grandest structure: a beautiful thirty-nine thousand-seater stadium. A gift from China.
*Vincent Munie is the director of Survie-France.
*This article appeared in the French edition of Pambazuka News and was translated by Josh Ogada.
*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Tagged under Governance Central African Republic
