 15th March 07 - James Waters ~ STWR MemberIn the past, I argued that Zimbabwe had been badly treated in the West, that its president Robert Mugabe had been demonised, and that countries should engage with Zimbabwe rather than isolate it. So the current worldwide pictures of the main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, with his face swollen and skull fractured following police beatings (*), are more than a little embarrassing. They make me look stupid. My position was unusual in the United Kingdom, but I supported the policy of quiet diplomacy and engagement adopted by South Africa and other regional countries towards Zimbabwe. The Western press and governments seemed only to become interested in the country when land was confiscated from major white farmers, and their claims to be concerned about abuses of democracy appeared to be a means to further attack the government for its illegal redistribution. In defence of Zimbabwe, it was possible to argue that the redistribution was a way to redress one of the world’s most unequal spreads of wealth and income. Yes, the manner of its implementation was regrettable, but the idea was fair. Yes, the outcomes were sometimes corrupt, but corruption was less, far less, than in many countries in which the West does business, extending formal state welcomes to their leaders. |
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 8th March 07 - Tiro Sebina, Mmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone)Fifty years ago, on March 6, 1957, Ghana attained its independence from Britain, becoming the first sub-Saharan country to do so. Over 100, 000 people gathered into Polo Ground in Accra, the capital city, to watch the historic proceedings. The ceremony took place at midnight. The air was electric as the Union Jack was lowered and the red, green and gold Ghananian flag was hoisted in its place. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana stood up to speak. He spoke about the presence of the 'new African personality' in the world and how African people were going to demonstrate to the world that they were prepared to lay their own foundation. In the years that followed, similar ceremonies took place in Guinea (1958), Nigeria (1960),Uganda (1962) and Kenya (1963). African people gathered at their respective national stadiums to celebrate. Admittedly these were legitimate occasions for joy. Fifty years on, we live in an Africa characterised by decay and decomposition of states. We have witnessed the woeful degeneration of former liberation movements. African nation-states are poorly resourced, undeveloped and under-developed. African states are locked in a dance of death within an in-egalitarian, unevenly integrated and highlypolarised world system shaped by the imperative of capitalist fundamentalism with its attendant quasi-religious ideology of privatisation. |
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20th Feb 07 - Emira Woods, Foreign Policy In Focus
In West African mythology, the "Sankofa" is a bird that flies forward while looking backward, with an egg symbolizing the future in its mouth. |
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17th Feb 07 - Eric Nicholls, TomPaine.com
News from Sub-Saharan Africa these days is mostly bad. Stories of extreme poverty, malnutrition, HIV/AIDS and political instability fill the media and the region’s prognosis seems bleak.
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 10th Feb - Avenging Angel Millions of South Africa’s children live in poverty and under conditions where their rights in the Constitution have not been realised. What is required from the African Union and the South African government is an outline to why South Africa has such high levels of child poverty, what child poverty is, and how it has been thought about.
There are two main reasons for the state of child poverty in South Africa. The first being the legacy of apartheid. Racially discriminatory policy has resulted in very high levels of inequality, with many of today’s black children inheriting the inequalities and omissions of the previous government. On the whole, schools, primary health care services and infrastructure are poor in historically black areas. In addition, large rural areas were declared homelands and subjected to systematic degradation, overcrowding and under-development. The poorest populations still live in these areas, where women and children are over-represented, and where there are huge backlogs in services and infrastructure. At the same time, the productive resources of the country, farms, factories and financial capital, continue to be in the hands of a mostly white minority. The BEE policies have somewhat impacted on the racial distribution of resources, but resource and asset distribution remain very similar to what they were at the beginning of the last decade.
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 18th Jan 07 - Patrick Bond, Socialist Worker
Author Patrick Bond on the neoliberal project:
Q: What are the dynamics of the looting of Africa?
Let's start with the process by which the new imperialism relies on the extraction of resources at ever-cheaper prices.
We are in a confused period, because since 2002, commodity prices--minerals, energy and even cash crops--have been on the rise. But many people will agree that it’s a small upturn in a commodity-price cycle that since the 1970s has been on a dramatic decline. It’s that sense in which multinational corporate power, and fealty to that power by African elites, has reached unprecedented peaks now.
This has become so extreme that even the World Bank has recognized that there’s no basis for economic development from the extraction of resources under the present regime. A little-known World Bank report, Where is the Wealth of Nations? which was published on the Web site this year, has even acknowledged the wealth drainage.
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 17th Jan 07 - Tonderai Matonho, The Herald (Africa)
The recent statement by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the gap between the rich and poor countries is ever-widening makes one wonder whether this schism is ever going to be closed or more aptly whether poor countries are ever going to catch-up with the rich nations.
There are interesting statistics to this effect that have been used since the 1990s that boggle the mind and that continue to deepen this puzzle. According to the World Bank's World Development Report the per capita Gross National Product (GNP) for Industrial Market Economies, that is, the 20 richest capitalist countries was US$12 960 in 1986, with an annual average growth rate (1965-86) of 2,3 percent. A simple calculation gives an annual increase in per capita income of US$298,08. The per capita GNP for the poorest 33 countries in the same year was US$270 with a growth rate of 3,1 percent. The same calculation gives an annul increase in income of only US$8,37. Given this scenario, little wonder that the gap between North and South is getting wider every year. |
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