The government has recovered Sh15 billion stolen from public coffers in the ongoing fight against corruption. The money had been siphoned by well-connected people in the former Kanu government, Justice and Constitutional Affairs minister Kiraitu Murungi disclosed at the weekend.

The Youth Development Network will be hosting a unique conference that seeks to bring integration to the sphere of Youth Development in South Africa. The conference will take place on the 5th and 6th of March 2003, at the Sunnyside Park Hotel, in Johannesburg.

I have just read my latest on-line copy of Pambazuka News and wish to tell you how much I appreciate receiving such an informative newsletter. Pambazuka newsletter is in a class of its own, with authoritative depth of coverage. It remains a source of up-to-date news, information and views from within and about Africa, and just for the price of 10 minutes at a cyber cafe, it is all yours. It will cost ten times as much to look for, and get access to all the information you have managed to put together so professionally. More grease to your elbows.

The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq. A leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York -- the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

As part of the campaign to force the Mozambican government to investigate the assassination of economist Antonio Siba-Siba Macuacua, a group of prominent Mozambicans has nominated him posthumously for the 2003 Integrity Award of the anti-corruption body Transparency International (TI).

Kenya's Anti-Corruption Police Unit (ACPU) have interrogated officials of Kenya's Euro-Bank, which collapsed last week, taking with it billions of shillings of depositors' money, an ACPU official said on Thursday. "We recorded statements late Wednesday from four top officials of the bank, including its chairman and managing director, on the whereabouts of the depositors money," ACPU representative Kaplich Baristo told AFP by telephone.

The World Bank's executive board has approved a new Water Resources Sector Strategy (WRSS). The Strategy says the Bank needs to shrug off its critics and boost spending on big dams, inter-basin transfers and other water megaprojects. Patrick McCully, Campaigns Director of International Rivers Network said in a press statement: "The strategy is a reactionary, dishonest and cynical document. If put into effect it would provide rich pickings for the Bank staff's friends in the big dam lobby and private water companies but only worsen poverty, water shortages and the dire condition of the world's rivers."

The Bush Administration is pressing African nations to support the impending war with Iraq, and the three African nations on the United Nations Security Council have been targets of special lobby efforts by the president, secretary of State and other administration officials.
As part of an intensive search for at least nine 'yes' votes on the Security Council resolution on Iraq introduced Monday, the administration last week dispatched Assistance Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner to the capitals of the three nations with current Council seats - Angola, Cameroon and Guinea, which takes over as Security Council president on March 1.
Related Link:
* Senegal steers course on Iraq
http://allafrica.com/stories/200303050218.html

The African Union (AU), the continent's foremost political body, has appealed to Burundi's warring parties and their leaders to "show restraint and a spirit of compromise with a view to preserving the gains made and to complete the process of restoring peace to the country".

Kenya's most senior judge, Bernard Chunga, under investigation for allegations of corruption and torture, resigned as chief justice on Tuesday, the president's office said. "President Mwai Kibaki has today accepted the resignation of Honourable Bernard Chunga as chief justice," the presidential press service said in a statement. They gave no further details.

On 26 February, the Minister of Finance tabled Budget 2003 in the National Assembly. As with every year, this kicked off a process of parliamentary deliberation that will culminate in the passing of the budget by Parliament in June 2003. A relatively new parliamentary committee, the Joint Budget Committee (JBC), is set to play a key role in the deliberations, but the exact structure of the parliamentary budget process is in a state of flux.

Connections between conflicts in Africa and its lack of development seem to speak for themselves. The 1990s saw three million African people killed while 160 million lived in countries with intra-state conflict. Intra-state conflict comprised 79 of the 82 conflicts of the last decade and 90% of casualties were civilians. Average income per capita in the continent is less than the 1960s, and it has the largest proportion of the world's poor. African wars are fought with few military resources so that appropriation of natural resources is a natural form of accumulation. Resources become used for pillage, protection money, to trade for arms, labour exploitation, land, and to claims for its mineral and water resources. Conflict is obviously anti-developmental, and an arena where the civilian poor, and women in particular, are likely to be the major casualties.

Within Africa four key structural conditions lead to violent intra-state conflict: authoritarian rule, marginalisation of ethnic minorities, socio-economic deprivation and inequality, and weak states lacking capacity to manage conflict effectively. The potential for conflict is heightened when these conditions are simultaneously present. Other problems add to that potential – lack of fit between nations and states due to the imposition of the 80,000 kilometres of colonial borders, land and environmental pressures, the small arms trade in itself linked to resource-based conflict, debt, and economic imbalance and unfair trade practices.

Within the last fifteen years the inter-relation between conflict and lack of development has been overlaid by the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. Conflict has arisen in response to stabilisation programmes where Southern regimes under pressure from Northern financial institutions and growing balance of payments constraints introduced policies abandoning social services. Policy moved from fulfilling popular demand to the removal of market barriers so that state-society relations became highly confrontational.

But conflict, including violent conflict, can also drive forward development and the fight for liberation and justice, as in South Africa. It is the reaction of social elites which determines whether such conflicts become violent. Violence may also be a liberating outlet for disaffected youth with no economic future and available for clan warlords as in Somalia or for gerontocratic leaders hanging on to power in Zimbabwe. Equally, 'development' can provoke conflict over resources and/ if its benefits are inequitably distributed (arguably a contributory factor in the Rwanda genocide). Emergency aid in 1980s Somalia for the victims of war and drought subsidised clan warfare. Terrorism is not strongly linked to poverty, but more to frustration, alienation and humiliation by, for example, colonization or marginalisation. Peace (or 'negative peace' in Johan Galtung's words) may hide major fault lines and human rights abuses, as is currently happening in Zimbabwe. Often gender discrimination is the most hidden, which poses problems for those who want a quick fix in peace-making and development.

At the moment we see a number of paradoxes when analysing the link between conflict and development. Indeed, historically, those working in peace/conflict resolution and those in development (for cynics neither of them spectacularly successful) long occupied different spheres (first and second generation human rights). Rethinking started in the mid-90s after post Berlin Wall hopes of a new international order were dashed by Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Angola. Conflicts subsumed under Cold War ideologies have now become more properly understood. The conflict and development disciplines are edging closer to each other nervously bringing 'identity', 'democracy' and 'good governance' with them. Increasingly, both spheres are aware that globalisation in making the world safe for investment is simultaneously widening inequalities and provoking insecurity as it reaches into less opened up regions. In response, there have been the beginnings of a reordering of international human rights work marked by: new international institutions like the International Criminal Court and various tribunals, qualifying absolute state sovereignty in the interests of a people's right to protection ('responsible state sovereignty'), tying basic human needs (including the right to enjoy a self-ascribed identity) into conflict avoidance or management (human security) and a critical examination of humanitarian intervention and the role of the United Nations (including the Brahimi Report).

In development the technical fixes of the 1960s moved into the basic needs approach of the 1970s to the rights-based approaches we currently see. To say this in a different way, people have begun to assert their right to be the subject rather than the object of development – the poor as claimers of their rights rather than passive recipients. Conflict mediation has ceased to be merely the preserve of nations and the rich and powerful. Recognition of needing to understand and address the roots of conflict has seen the emergence of alternative or Track Two diplomacy/mediation on a people-people basis.

On the other side, mantras like sustainable or rights-based development, and governance, become neutralised and depoliticised by the multilateral agencies and international financial institutions vaunting the magic and inevitability of the impersonal hand of the market. Good governance is a long way from 'democratic governance' where non-market development could be a preferred option.

At the present time we see a preponderance of ethnic conflict plus the resurgence of religious-focused conflict with overtones of medieval Europe and Asia meeting. In fact these conflicts can be posed as being over identity in which human needs are not being met, meaning that we have to see peace and development within the new thinking around human security. Traditionally, security has been viewed as firmly rooted in the nation state, itself the source of 'identity'. It has operated through agreements between different militaries and political elites: a strongly male arena. But what happens to traditional security - and identity - when weaker nation states are less able to control their own policy as power shifts to global social formations, and markets are dominated by (Northern) transnational corporations, multilateral financial and trading institutions? Building development on more strongly felt 'ethnic' identities and diversities may be one way forward in overcoming conflict and promoting development. There is a natural link here with human security - of people not just territory, individuals not just nations, through development not arms.

Finally if we are talking genuine North-South partnership to deal with conflict and lack of development, partners have the right to demand of British-based NGOs what they are doing in relation to their own government's rush to war. It is important therefore that we and they understand what is happening, as we have attempted to do in a joint Catholic Institute for International Relations(CIIR) and Conflict, Development and Peace network (CODEP) seminar in October 2002. In disputing he was 'Bush's poodle' Tony Blair said ironically 'it's much worse than that, I would do it anyway', i.e. be prepared to engage in war with Iraq. This re-running of Gladstonian moral foreign policy is more worrying as we are being invited to be a junior global policeman on shaky international legal justification in an open-ended war without frontiers against terrorism. The challenge is for principled opposition to war against Iraq to respond in an analytical and measured way to the question 'what would you do against terrorism?' 'Attack global poverty, Western hypocrisy, and dismantle unfair global economic architecture' is a necessary but not sufficient answer. Obviously the Al-Quaeda - Iraq link demands a great deal more proof beyond the fact they both share the letter Q. The British government's linkage with the USA is based on a fallacy. London's case rests on attacking both poverty and terrorism in an attempt to link attributed cause and effect. All evidence from Washington over such disparate but developmental and conflict-related matters as Kyoto, Israel, International Criminal Court, and increased subsidies for farmers show a unilateralist approach based on dominance and firepower without regard to either cause or effect. The questions posed at a recent CIIR/ CODEP seminar - how do we use global resources equitably, how do we control weapons of mass destruction and how we deal with the imbalance between the powerful and the rest of the world still remain the key questions in the relation between violent conflict and development.

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Trade liberalisation used to be uncontroversial. Today, it is blamed for many of the world's ills. What went wrong? This study assesses the evidence and suggests that we need an international trading system that contributes to sustainable development. It should be built from the bottom-up and all nations should take part in defining it.

The focus of the UN summit in Johannesburg in September 2002 was ‘people, planet and prosperity’, yet at the same time, Johannesburg is the staging post for millions of tonnes of UN food aid. About 13 million people in southern Africa face severe food shortages and famine. What are the causes of this crisis and who is responsible? The food crisis in southern Africa has many causes, which vary in magnitude from country to country. A study by Oxfam suggests that one major cause of the critical food insecurity is the failure of agricultural reforms designed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The celebrated trial and conviction of six men accused of murdering Carlos Cardoso, one of Mozambique's top investigative journalists, was both a triumph of the openness of the court proceedings, and an indictment of the corruption among the country's rich and powerful.

As they have for nearly two weeks now, desperate Liberian refugees continued to demonstrate in front of the offices of the United Nations refugee agency in Abidjan demanding to be evacuated out of Côte d'Ivoire or moved to a safer location.

Western Cape premier and New National Party (NNP) leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk fended off an attack by the Democratic Alliance (DA) as more allegations of corruption were made against members of his cabinet. The DA believes that Van Schalkwyk must have known about the R300000 party funding scandal involving the Roodefontein golf estate and is convinced that this has adversely affected the NNP's co-operation agreement with the African National Congress (ANC).

As the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continues to work towards genuine peace and national reconciliation, a joint United Nations team is coordinating a series of meetings underway in Pretoria, where Congolese parties are pressing ahead with efforts to bolster a recent peace accord. Under the auspices of the joint UN/South Africa mediation team, two technical committees met for the first time in Pretoria as part of the follow-up to the 17 December signing of a comprehensive power-sharing agreement.

UNICEF Ghana initiated an integrated early childhood development (IECD) pilot project in mid-2002 to reach out to deprived children and their caregivers in Konkomba market, a slum in the capital city of Accra. The project involves partnership and network building among various stakeholders including governmental agencies, NGOs, and the media. Key strategies include bringing child minders and parents together to understand the needs and rights of the children under their care. To this end, project activities include empowerment and capacity building of parents, child minders, and the community through education and support for proper child care.

After the three days informal WTO meeting held in Tokyo last weekend, Oxfam International has concluded that the WTO process is far off the development track. Developed countries again failed to act in the spirit of the Doha Development Agenda and to make trade fair.