Is your Member of Parliament suddenly proving elusive? And are you at a loss as to why he or she cannot honour pledges for fund-drives, or are you wondering why "call or see me next week" has become his/her perpetual excuse? A survey carried out two months ago, explains just why most of our MPs are becoming desperately dodgy - they are spending far more than they earn. The report, "Paying the Public or Caring for Constituents", explores expenditure patterns by the MPs. The Transparency International-Kenya survey is part of an endeavour to examine aspects of public affairs that impact on corruption.

More than 40 MPs have signed secret agreements to pay debts owed to a travel agency implicated in a parliamentary R15-million voucher scam. In terms of the deals, any MPs who fail to pay money owed to ITC Travel Services within a year will have summons issued against them and will face being blacklisted for bad debt.

Guinea's ailing head of state, General Lansana Conte, was sworn in for another seven-year term on Monday. The swearing-in ceremony took place before a panel of Supreme Court judges. While Conte was able to take his oath of office in a loud, clear voice, the difficulty he experienced in getting from his seat to the rostrum has led to further speculation about the President’s decline and his ability to embark on another seven years in power. Conte, 69, who first came to power through a coup d'etat in 1984, cleared 95.2 percent of the vote in the elections on December 21. But the poll was boycotted by opposition parties (most of whose candidates had already been ruled ineligible to stand by the authorities) and the results were announced amidst accusations of electoral fraud and vote-rigging.

An anti-corruption committee was last week installed to check corrupt practices in the Ministry of Employment, Labour and Social Insurance. The installation ceremony was chaired by Minister Robert Nkili at the Yaounde conference centre. Minister Nkili told members of the anti-corruption committee that the ultimate wish of the Cameroonian people of all classes and shades of opinion was to check and possibly eradicate corrupt practices in the public service. According to him, the country has enough resources but lacks honest managers.

Each month as many as 150 children sleeping rough in the capital, Harare, are being treated for sexually transmitted infections (STIs), underlining their extreme vulnerability, according to a local NGO. Streets Ahead, an organisation trying to improve the welfare of Harare's 5,000 street children, said they discovered the STI outbreak when the children visited their offices for counselling and other support programmes.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation (NMF) and the University of Fort Hare (UFH) have established the Unit for Rural Schooling & Development at UHF to implement the NMF’s Rural Schools Development Programme in the Eastern Cape. The aim of the Programme is to enhance the quality of teaching and learning in rural schools by strengthening links between schools and communities.

It is articles like this inspired editorial that make your newsletter invaluable (Pambazuka News 139: How Africa develops Europe). Whereas most press outside Africa portray doom and gloom in Africa (as aptly pointed out in the editorial), you offer a rich mix of the good and bad on the continent.

Yes indeed, we Africans need to stand up against the 21st century menace to Africa; the economic, social, and political exploitation of the continent by the so-called 'developed' countries. Rather than being sheep being led to the slaughterhouse, we should say enough is enough. In all our daily endeavours wherever we are, we need to channel our efforts towards the betterment of our motherland. For example, President Kibaki correctly pointed out that were Kenyans in the Diaspora to buy Kenyan tea and coffee, the country wouldn't need anyone else to buy it to better their lot in the farms.

A shift in the mindset of the African is needed; to believe in our continent, and to question grants, aid, etc emanating from the West. As sagely pointed out 'not all that glitters...' and 'when the deal is too good...'. Granted, the Western civilisation has its benefits, but the African will always remain in the periphery of such benefits, being in the agenda when there is something to be reaped, aka Iraq (read Gulf of Guinea - Cameroon, Equitorial Guinea, Chad, Sudan and all the other countries between Nigeria and Angola). We need a new Egyptian civilisation, nay, an African civilisation: at least its nemesis. Only then will Africa's posterity judge us leniently.

Hooray! With a masterstroke of the pen Antoinnette Ntuli has given true meaning to the Kiswawhili word "kupambazuka": morning has broken (Pambazuka 139: How Africa develops Europe). Not only did Europe under develop Africa but Africa is still developing the world and haemorrhaging for it. The stuff terrorism is made of!

Burkina Faso's Defence Minister, General Kouame Lougue, was sacked at the weekend, a week after the state prosecutor revealed that he had been questioned in connection with a coup plot against President Blaise Campaore. Lougue, who was very popular within the army, was replaced by Yero Boli, the head of Campaore's presidential staff, a trusted civilian aide of the president, who was Minister of the Interior until 2000.

The State of the World's Children 2004 presents girls' education as one of the most crucial issues facing the international development community. The report argues that the theories, policies and practices of development have been marked by gender discrimination and that the standard approach to development has focused on economic growth rather than human welfare. Through The State of the World's Children 2004, UNICEF calls on every nation engaged in development to make the education of all children - with an emphasis on girls - a major focus of investment.

The Angolan government has reacted strongly to accusations of corruption and mismanagement made by the NGO Human Rights Watch. According to a government response, Human Rights Watch had resumed accusations formerly levelled by some international circles - without any serious base for supporting the allegations - that over 4bn dollars generated from the oil sector between 1997 and 2002 went missing from state coffers.

Lesotho remains a fragile democracy despite electoral reforms designed to strengthen its political system, a South African political think-tank has argued. A new report by the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) argues that steps towards deepening democracy in the tiny country continued to be undermined by ongoing social and economic problems, which could serve to reverse some of the gains made so far. The report, "The Road to Democratic Consolidation in Lesotho, Reforms and Challenges", noted that the political culture remained adversarial, and problems of political violence and poor accountability should not be regarded as solved.

AFFORD, the African Foundation for Development (http://www.afford-uk.org), will be partnering Pambazuka News in producing one of our new sections, News from the Diaspora. If you would like to contribute information to this section, email your news to editor@pambazuka.org. There are a number of other new sections in Pambazuka News this week, including a Comment and Analysis section and a Land and Land Rights section. Other previously existing sections have been separated. Please let us know what you think of our new format.

Increasingly attention is being given to documenting the extent to which Africa (and the rest of the developing world) is in fact providing development aid, as opposed to being a recipient of Aid. This aid is being provided through myriad ways including financial relations, subsidising ecological resources, provision of ready trained skilled labour and, increasingly, providing holiday resorts of unbeatable value.

The slave trade was the most visceral manifestation of the ongoing exploitative relationship between Africa and the rich world. The haunting images of manacled Africans toiling in the cotton fields of the USA have now been replaced with images of starvation, war, brutality, fecklessness and HIV. These graphic images, beamed throughout the world, perpetuate a sense of need and dependence that serves the purposes of powerful and wealthy states. Such images make it easy to believe that Africa both requires and could benefit from Western Aid. This however belies the real relationship between Africa and the West. In reality, in order to understand Africa’s relationship with the developed world, it is important to look at figures which show that, far from contributing nothing to the economy of developed countries and taking everything in return, Africa’s contribution to developed countries could be considered as its own form of development aid.

According to Jubilee Research the accumulated external debt of the world’s richest country, the USA, is $2.2 trillion – almost the same as the $2.5 trillion owed by the entire developing world including India, China and Brazil. They calculate that this means that every American citizen owes the rest of the world $7,333 while every citizen of all the developing countries only owes the rest of the world $500. Meanwhile the poor are financing the debt of the developed world, as capital flows from poor countries, helping to lower rich countries interest rates and inflate the value of their currencies, enable them to purchase goods from the rest of the world far more cheaply than they would otherwise have been able to do.

Jubilee Research have also quantified the economic damage attributable to natural disasters arising from climate change as being more than $300 billion per annum. Industrialised countries (at least historically) are almost entirely responsible for human driven global warming although 96% of all deaths from natural disasters occur in developing countries. The value of economic output built on growing ‘carbon debt’ (in which carbon debt is calculated according to the amount by which a country exceeded its fair share in the emission of greenhouse gasses) attributable to the G7 countries, was estimated as being in the region of $13- 15 trillion for a typical year in the 1990’s – while the conventionally indebted poor countries had a carbon credit that could be valued at three times their orthodox debt. Thus if this concept of debt is used, the developing world is subsidising the rich world and should perhaps be considering what structural adjustment processes the rich world needs to put in place in order to meet their debt repayments.

The UNDP calculated that by 1987 nearly one third of Africa’s skilled people had moved to Europe - Sudan lost 17% of doctors and dentists, 20% of University teaching staff, 30% of engineers and 45% of surveyors in 1978; 60% of Ghanaian doctors trained in the early 80s are now abroad; and Africa as a whole is thought to have lost up to 60 000 middle and high level managers between 1985 and 1990. This reverse subsidy seems set to continue. Some estimates indicate that mechanistic and flawed developed country staff forecasting needs mean that the USA, for example, will require 1 million additional nurses in the next ten years to meet its shortfall.

Writers on human resources such as Bundred and Martineau put the cost of training a GP as US$60 000, calculating a reverse subsidy from the developing world of US$500m per annum just for health personnel. In South Africa alone, the loss of more than 82,000 skilled personnel over an eight-year period between 1989 and 1997 is estimated to have cost the country US$5 billion. UNCTAD quantified US savings of US$3.86 billion in training costs as a result of importing 21 000 Nigerian doctors over a ten year period.

Central to these startling statistics are structural adjustment programmes. Rather than providing restitution for the period of formal occupation of African Countries that took place between the 1880s and 1960s, the West channelled large sums of monies into newly independent African countries through massive bank loans. In the process a number of Banks became severely stretched. With the 80s came an intense period of structural adjustment programmes, the immediate objective of which, according to Walden Bello, was to rescue banks that had become overextended; the longer-term objective was to further integrate Southern countries into the North dominated world economy. Although initially few countries were keen to take structural adjustment loans, as more and more countries ran into difficulty servicing the huge debts made to them, so they had no option but to ‘structurally adjust’.

Structural adjustments demanded that, as a pre-condition to receiving aid, developing countries open their markets to globalisation and privatise their utilities such as water and electricity services. Among the other requirements were tightening of state expenditure and devaluation of currencies resulting in an end to free health and education and dramatic cut backs in these services.

The withdrawal of resources for education and health initiated a cycle of deprivation in which working conditions, including salaries deteriorated, triggering an exodus of staff and further debilitating the services. Simultaneously, funding of academic training institutions was reduced, and there was a concurrent flight of intellectuals and decimation of institutions of higher learning. Philip Altbach calculates that roughly 1.5 million students (most of whom leave the South to study in the North) study in countries outside their own, and a significant number do not return.

The net effect has been to strip countries of a significant component of their social capital and create a vacuum of skill, conveniently providing jobs for highly trained Westerners, (to be paid for in hard currency) and simultaneously the conditions for Africa to be reduced to providing technical level education and producing a workforce only fit to do the dirty jobs of the rich world.

And just as there seems to be broad agreement that Structural Adjustment has not been beneficial to Africa, General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) is ready and poised to fill the gap. The combined worth of health and education markets is estimated to be US$5 Trillion according to Bertrand and Kalafatides. If the major proponents of GATS have their way, all these services will be up for grabs by powerful Transnational Corporations, and the right of African States to provide these common goods will be emasculated.

What the figures above show is that, combined with conditions like structural adjustment and GATS, the cycle of development aid from Africa to Europe and the rest will be continued. For African intellectuals, students, political activists and Africanists everywhere this signals a call for international solidarity of the kind inspired by the anti-apartheid movement - as a countervailing force against the new world order that compels Africa to continue to feed the bloated stomach of greed.

* Antoinette Ntuli is Director of HealthLink and Chairs the Co-ordinating Committee of the Global Equity Gauge Alliance
* Please send comments on this editorial - and other events in Africa - to

A new 71 page research report from the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) seeks to evaluate the prospects for the endurance of multiparty democracy in Lesotho. The data used is based primarily on information gathered during interviews with key stakeholders - i.e. political parties, electoral commissioners, civil society and the donor community - in the political processes in Lesotho. The text is descriptive and analytical. It is mainly concerned with current events and the recent past in Lesotho, but also places events in context by bringing out distinguishing characteristics of the country's politics, its problems and prospects, and the principal elements of its democratization process.

I read, with a sense of relief, that Madiba has expressed his anger with the United States of America. Not a moment too soon. However endearing the 330 million individuals who constitute the American people may be, the mindset that this super power has produced is beyond doubt, a serious threat to world peace. Why? Well take a load of the arsenal for starters. Then let us consider this not so small matter of economic imperialism. Such a cool gig: got the bucks, call the shots. Sick last century stuff. Last but not least let us not overlook the danger of arrogant ignorance. When only a mere fraction of a wealthy population (18%) bother to get passports and they vote by virtue of their choices and exert a major influence on global affairs, please forgive this little African woman when she asks a few questions.

I arrived in America a few days after 9/11. I arrived from a small African country and was regarded as a heroine for being so brave as to fly! Perhaps having lived through a so-called terrorist war which was in fact a liberation struggle had immunised me to an extent against hysteria. I didn't feel brave - I was just longing to visit precious friends and there had been tremendous spontaneous compassion for the victims and their families in my homelands. We, who are no strangers to suffering and violence. People who had not even seen the, by now, nigh almost indelible images of the World Trade Towers morphing into Ground Zero. People who when they heard I was about to go to the USA said, "Ah sisi ... please tell America sorry for this terrible thing." People who do not have television sets but had heard, via bush telegraph, of what had transpired. People with heart per chance. African people. All I know is that back home we were horrified and saddened by the disaster. It was not wasted energy for empathy is always of value.

My compassion remains intact. However, the Hollywoodesque flourishes to the aftermath tarnished the bereavement. I heard literally hundreds of Americans say "We were hit on our own soil!" as if this were unique and apocalyptic. Eventually, I found myself saying to one, "Perhaps you could discuss this with the 100 or so countries your army is currently occupying. It could be an interesting bonding experience." My educated friend was clueless about this which I found disturbing. Bombs and refreshments to Afghanistan was a policy that went unchallenged as was the overnight erosion of internal civil and human rights. Right there in the heartland of the free and the brave. Stunning what you can get away with when you declare a unilateral global war against terror.

* Read the rest of this article by clicking on the link below.

As another year came to an end, democracy in Angola was carefully folded like a handkerchief and prominently featured in the chest pocket of its ruler’s jacket. The folding took place at the ruling Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) 5th party congress in December, where it was expected that the conclave would send a strong signal on the course of democracy in the country, given that the democratic mandate of the current government expired in 1996, and that due to the war between 1998 and 2002 elections were postponed until peaceful days arrived. But as 2004 begins and almost two years into peace, there are no signs of even a date for elections that will set the normalization of State institutions in motion.

On December 09 at the party congress, the president of MPLA and only candidate, José Eduardo dos Santos, was re-elected for another five-year term, unanimously and by acclamation not by vote. When it came to suggestions for a fair democratic process by secret ballot only the president voted in favour of such a procedure. The other delegates, more than 1400 of them, voted for acclamation. There was only a single abstention.

* Read the rest of this article by clicking on the link below.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy, speaking at the closure of the WSF3.

The future shape of the World Social Forum (WSF) will continue to be moulded as up to 75 000 people meet in a massive “free space” between 16-21 January in Mumbai, India to discuss the ravages of the neo-liberal order on all aspects of global life. The fourth WSF will focus debate on the areas of imperialist globalisation, religious sectarianism, identity politics and fundamentalism, castes, racism and social exclusion, patriarchy and militarisation. The WSF has become an annual event that is organised as an antidote to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, seen by civil society opposition as an elite deliberation between world leaders and international financial institutions.

Several hundred members of the African Social Forum (ASF) will represent Africa at the WSF. The ASF has taken place annually, since Bamako in 2002, as a prelude to the WSF. Following the Bamako Forum and the second ASF meeting, the Addis Ababa Forum, a process of consultations have taken place around Africa to find a way of effectively exposing the current social, political and economic injustices for better government and state action. These have resulted in various regional forums designed to create a platform for interest groups of civil society to discuss issues together relating to social, political and economic justice. An example of a regional forum is the Southern African Social Forum, whose objectives are to: Provide the sub-regional platform for social activists to strengthen popular democracy and mobilization; Critically challenge the status quo; Build a regional solidarity network around issues of social, political and economical justice; and, Create a loose coalition that will guarantee effective participation in the future Southern African Social Forum (SASF), the Africa Social Forum (ASF) and the World Social Forum (WSF).

At the first ASF meeting in Bamako, more than two hundred social movements, organisations and institutions from forty-three African countries met to undertake serious analyses, shared experiences and heard testimonies on wide-ranging economic, social, political and cultural matters affecting African peoples.

A strong consensus emerged at the Bamako Forum that the values, practices, structures and institutions of the currently dominant neo-liberal order would not lead to the realisation of Africa's dignity, values and aspirations. The Forum rejected neo-liberal globalisation and further integration of Africa into an unjust system as a basis for its growth and development. In this context, there was a strong consensus against initiatives such as the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and trade liberalisation. The Bamako Forum also noted that neo-liberal globalization had further eroded the human rights of the people of Africa. “When the basic needs of the people to food, shelter, clothing, housing and sources of energy are daily under threat because of forced privatisation and opening up of Africa to multinational corporations, then neither democracy nor human rights are possible,” a statement from the forum reads.

Development, said the Forum, should be based on the human being and not on the profit of corporations. Furthermore, it was only on the basis of the satisfaction of the basic material needs and the human rights of the people that genuine democracy could be built.

At the second ASF held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from January 5-9, 2003 over 200 African women, men and young people from 40 countries participated. They represented social movements, trade unions, peasants' organisations, NGOs and research institutions, and reaffirmed opposition to and rejection of the global neo-liberal system, its institutions and clubs, namely, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the G 8 and the World Economic Forum. Presentations were made on various thematic issues, including international trade, privatization, debt, the African Union, wars and conflicts, agriculture, the question of food security, health, and African cultures. The practice of social movements in Africa since the Bamako meeting was also reviewed, as was the progress made to develop and strengthen the ASF, to consolidate its place within the world anti-neoliberal movement, and to build popular struggles for economic justice on the ground.
The Forum observed that past and present economic policies implemented by African governments have failed to improve the lives of ordinary Africans. “We concluded that only a dynamic civil society organized in strong and active social movements can and must challenge the neo-liberal political economy of globalization. The consensus was that we need to build a new African state and society, where public institutions and policies will guarantee cultural, economic, political and social rights for all citizens,” said a statement.

There was also a consensus that African unity and social integration were fundamental aspirations of the ASF. Unity had to be organized and achieved through democratic mechanisms and institutions built with the popular participation of the African masses. “This is why the ASF expressed deep concern and dissatisfaction with the neo-liberal orientation of the African Union through its adoption of NEPAD as the paradigm of Africa 's development…The African Social Forum commits itself to developing, promoting and popularizing, in a participatory manner, an alternative development paradigm, based on fundamental principles of democracy, human rights, gender equality and social justice.”
The WSF offers the ASF the opportunity to consolidate links with and make input into a global platform opposing neo-liberal globalisation. In the current global political economy, it might be easy to believe that the ASF and its bigger relative the WSF are likely to have little impact on world events. But as Jai Sen, a member of the WSF India Working Committee and Coordination Team, writes: “Perhaps most importantly, the WSF has struck at the level of meaning. It has resonantly made clear that there is an alternative to economic, capitalist globalisation, there are alternatives. And that people all over the world are now mobilising to live those alternatives. In this way, the WSF – along with all the other forms of global civil action that are also taking place - is playing a profound role in freeing peoples all over the world of the shackles of the colonisation of the mind.”

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org

The above article was compiled by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu, with material sourced from the links below:

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=12669
http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=11315
http://www.enda.sn/Forum%20social/english/bamakoeng.htm
http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/1417.html
http://www.wsfindia.org/anotherworld.php
http://www.labournet.info/wsfbook2004/guide.doc
http://www.labournet.info/wsfbook2004/cock.doc
http://earth.prohosting.com/sasf2003/mission.htm
http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/72788/1/
http://www.tni.org/acts/wsf/wsf4.htm
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2003-12/30prashad.cfm
http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/interna.asp?idnews=21911

Election agents, party supporters and the electorate were subject to violence and intimidation as a political tool during the Kadoma Central by-election held from 29-30 November 2003, says a just-released report from the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum on political violence in Zimbabwe for the month of November 2003. "The prospects for a free and fair electoral environment had already been dampened by violence that prevailed in the area prior to the election and the surrounded the holding of Nomination Court in October. The by-election was characterized by the infringement of the right freedom of association, expression and movement, with several reports of assault, political intimidation and death threats."

While the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is a welcome addition to pan-African institutional structure, its design will have to be improved for it to be truly successful. First, APRM should greatly narrow the scope of its reviews if it is to deliver competent assessments. Second NEPAD should devote significant resources to allow civil society in the reviewed country to do assessments of their own, and to critique the APRM assessment. This is according to a paper on the APRM by Ravi Kanbur, T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs and Professor of Economics at Cornell University.