African Woman – W8 conference, Edinburgh.  The aim of the conference which took place last week was to look at "the issues of debt, poverty, trade, women’s rights, sustainability……….and the situation of women in African countries. 

The eight women are:

Wangari Maathi
Graca Machel
Lornah Kiplagat
Hauwa Ibrahim
Alivera Kiiza
Winnie Byanyima
Anna Tibaijuka
Grace Githigia

Winnie Byanyima; ‘Corruption is not only an African problem, it’s a global problem. Secondly, the 21st Century is in need of resources. Also, the problems must be tackled from many angles. There are not many strong structures that are effective. What is being created is an elite hierarchy. Africa needs to reform its system.’

Gloria Essian from Nigeria; ‘Traditional attitudes are changing as women and girls are challenging the status quo of man and join the male dominated professions. A woman is part of the estate of the man. From birth to death women are expected to stay at home and look after it. This is changing and women are becoming empowered.’

With all the media, blogs and mainstream, focused on Live 8, Geldof and the G8 this important and significant meeting went largely unnoticed and unreported.  Here was a missed  opportunity for all of us including  the media to listen to the women of Africa speak. 

Steve Bell

Africa’s New Best Friends

The G8 have put multinational corporations at the center of poverty relief in African countries.  The African Growth and Opportunity Act and the Corporate Council of Africa (CAA) which represents MNCs with interests in Africa (Halliburton, Exxon, Mobil, Coca-cola, General Motors, Starbucks, Microsoft, Boeing, Cargill and Citigroup) are the two US foreign policy instruments entrusted with the new corporate colonization of Africa.   

The UK equivalent representing a similar line up of corporations (Shell, British American Tobacco, Standard Chartered Bank, De Beers and the CCA) is the Business Action for Africa.   With friends like these who needs enemies?   WAKE UP PEOPLE - we are being shat on from all directions - the scramble is on.   

Who is leading or rather fooling who?

"At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our demands.   It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us dancing and cheering towards theirs"

The response from the liberal
blogosphere to any criticism of the Live 8 concert and the ideology
of paternalistic simplicity espoused by Geldof et al has been
“at least they are doing something” or “its better than
nothing” or a comment I read on African
Bullets & Honey  ”Pennies on the dollar are better
than no pennies at all" or some other  naïve variant.
Statements such as these contain a loosely concealed
self-congratulatory, paternalist and arrogant attitude towards Africa
and Africans.

My argument is that No It is not better
than nothing and that what they are doing is actually damaging to
African countries.     Furthermore the Live 8 concert
reinforces racist stereotypes and like most liberal projects fails to
challenge the status quo or address the real issues.  It is as if
people so much want to believe that Geldof’s agenda for Africa has
and will make a difference that they cannot see the wood for the
trees.  There is a desperateness about their rush to believe the
superficial explanations offered to them.  I can only conclude
that the truth is just too much for people to bear.  The
bleeding hearts of liberalism cannot face the reality that their
liberalism will solve nothing, that it colludes with the maintenance
of the status quo and actually will cause more harm than good.

One of the pro-Geldof copouts is that
Westerners are deprived of information about African countries and
therefore something like Live 8 will give them the missing
information.  Rubbish. Westerners and other non-Africans do not
need to live in Africa or live in any other part of the world to
understand what is happening there.   The information is
available; Americans and Europeans have much more access to
information than the rest of the world; if they choose not to read
the available information that is because they have no desire or
interest in doing so.

My prediction
that the presentation of African countries during Saturday’s concerts
would be a negative pitiful one  was correct. We were presented
with Africa as the “scar of the world”, passive, starving,
diseased, dying  and helpless. This was a conscious decision by
the organisers of the concert to make the crowd sympathetic to their
cause and at the same time make them feel good, make them feel as if
they had made a contribution to saving Africa.    I am
reminded of an American TV programme we watched as children  in
Nigeria: The Lone Ranger.  At the end of each programme after
the Lone Ranger had fought off the baddies and saved the poor
defenseless people his horse would rear up  and he would shout
“hiooooooo Silver” and then ride into the wilderness till the
following week.   And so to we are all asked to give
"thanks and praises" to the great white chief Geldof on his
shining white horse.

Madeleine Bunting writing in today’s Guardian
quotes Cambridge historian, John Lonsdale description of Blair’s
Agenda for Africa as

"a construction that
infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us
too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of
self-importance."

Not only does it infantilise Africans
and Europeans, it also facilitates the continued appropriation of all
things African and all things in Africa including our problems
and reduces the issues to cheap sound bites and meaningless
nauseating rhetoric that go down well in
the kindergarden playground of liberal politics.  She goes on to
say

It is almost as if the west
can’t accept African agency: we want the simplification of the four
Ps (picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic, and above, all passive)
because it so neatly caters for our fears, derived from the colonial
history of the "dark continent" of Joseph Conrad fame. Is
this the price that has to be paid for an instant of western
attention? 

I would add that the Blair/Geldof
agendas aim to reduce western guilt, fulfill
the chronic need to "feel good” and reinforce western feelings
of superiority towards the other all of which are  underpinned by an
insidious racism.  A prime of this  example is the lack of any
"visible participation of Africans" in this whole
enterprise which Tajudeen
Abdul-Raheem describes as "trying to shave someone’s head in
their absence". 

As I have said, the Live 8 crusade and the response that "at
least they are doing something" will damage
African countries in a number of ways.  Firstly  Live8 and
its accompanying ideology  has served to undermine the
anti-globalisation movement and any real challenge to changing the
status quo.  John
Pilger critiquing the "unrelenting
sophistry of Geldof, Bono and Blair"   explains how
the spin works:

"The illusion of an anti-establishment crusade
led by pop stars" which is in reality " a cultivated,
controlling image of rebellion - serves to dilute a great political
movement of anger"

Secondly the crusade has managed to
completely ignore the realities of the recent so called "debt
relief" to the 30 countries in the world.  Geldof and Bono
both hailed the announcement as

"a victory for millions"

An historic deal to free
more than 30 countries from the crippling shackles of debt to the
West was hailed by Bob Geldof yesterday as
a "victory for millions"….. The $55billion settlement,
which will immediately benefit countries from Ethiopia and Uganda to
Rwanda and Mozambique, was the beginning rather than the end, the
campaigning rock star said…...The
Observer.

"a little piece of history"

"What we have here today is a little piece of
history," the U2 frontman told Britain’s Sky News television
after the G8 agreed to wipe away $40 billion ($52 billion) of debt
owed by 18 of the world’s poorest nations, most of them in Africa."

The truth is however very different. 

First of all only 18 countries are covered of which 16 are in
Africa when in fact there are some 60 plus countries that should be
relieved of their debt.

The IMF and World bank will "monitor the indebted countries
progress and decide if they are to be relieved of the debt burden".
In other words the debt is dependent on the IMF/World Bank and it is
in their interest for the debt relief to take place as slowly as
possible.

For each 1$ of debt relief, each country will loose 1$ in new
aid from the International
Development Association/World Bank. So what they give with one
hand they take away with the other.

The worst aspect of the debt cancellation are the conditionalities
imposed on those selected countries.  "the reality is that
the finance minister’s proposal has the potential to deliver to the
wealthy nations more money than they have written off" What is
presented as "charity" is in fact more money for the West:

By a) boosting  private sector development and b) good
governance

meaning privatising the public sector such as electricity and
power, health and education;    allowing foreign investment;
removing obstacles to foreign investment (eg be less stringent on
pollution requirements than in the west, allow foreign companies to
bring in their own staff or staff from outside the local community in
which they operate.); cooperation with the "war on terror";
purchase of Western goods (nearly 70% of US aid money is tied to the
purchase of US products and in Italy 100% of aid is tied to the
purchase of Italian goods).

These are the same IMF/World Bank/G8 policies that have been
killing  Africa in the past.   Arms sales from Britain
to Africa amount to more than $1 billion. So on the one hand Blair
is advocating cancellation of debt WITH conditionalities that benefit
Britain and on the other he is selling $1 billion worth of arms to
African countries. How do policies such as these alleviate poverty
and where is the justice? Whose victory are we celebrating here?

The new deal for Africa is the same as the old deal - nothing has
changed.  "The
G8’s interest in Africa is summed up in a 2003 World Bank report that
identifies sub-Saharan Africa as the most profitable place in the
world for direct foreign investment" - that is where the
truth lies.

For a fuller explanation of the impact of debt relief on the 18 countries see:

 Africa:  repudiate foreign debt, Raised Voices, Vivelecanada. 

[Read more…]

G8 countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the USA — are still supplying military equipment, weapons and munitions to destinations where they contribute to gross violations of human rights.  Destination countries: Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), the Republic of Congo, Colombia and the Philippines.

"Do They Know Its Christmas" has just been re-recorded - remember the lyrics? 

  "underneath a burning sun………….where nothing ever grows" "no rain nor river flows"

This is the vision of Africa being sold to millions of young people all over the West - an African stereotype  described by Gerald Caplan (writing in Pambazuka News) as

"helpless, dependent, passive victims, and we westerners as decent, selfless, compassionate, resourceful missionaries"

                                        OR

Paul Wolfowitz’s (the new authority on Africa) conclusion is that the problem in Africa is "corruption"   -we can all guess where he is coming from with that statement.

In his article "The Live G8 Concerts:  Hold On Africa - here we
come!" Caplan writes that these simplistic views of Africa "leave the
rich world blameless for Africa’s multitude of problems" whilst at the
same time Live 8 "strengthens the notion that we in the rich world must be missionaries to save Africans from themselves.

These simplistic and reductionist views of Africa  are not just
unhelpful they  actually add to the problems Africa faces as it reduces
them to  "natural causes - bad luck".  Surely young people in the West
are able to receive a more complex and real explanation of Africa? Maybe
if they had a fuller understanding they would be more able to affect
changes in their own government that benefit Africa as well as
understanding the social relations between themselves and African people,
rather than simply
gathering together and holding hands as if by sheer thought power they
can bring about change (Geldof at Glastonbury 2005).

Not discounting the responsibility of our own leaders for the
continuous economic and social chaos that is Africa today, Caplan lists
areas where the west is particularly culpable.   

Years
of support to African tyrants and white racists; retrograde free market
policies of the IMF and World Bank; tying foreign aid to compulsory
purchase of goods and services from the West;  draining of African
professionals trained in African universities; plunder of natural
resources by Western corporations who pollute, pay starvation wages,
leave conflict and human rights abuses in their wake;  demanding user
fees for health and educational services; cutting public services; and I would add to that, privatisation of public services.

Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie (of AFFORD - African Foundation for Development)
also writing in Pambazuka News goes much further in his criticism of
Western myths and constructs of an Africa helpless, corrupt, aid
dependent and all things awful and miserable that is crying out for the
missionary zeal of the Geldofs/Bonos and  Blairs/Browns of the West.

He turns the table on the West and suggests that it is not only
Africa that is in receipt of Aid, the West also needs to be weaned off
the Aid it receives from Africa and lists 5 areas where that aid comes
from.

• Remittances from Africans living abroad (BL - Blame the immigrants), provides by far the bulk of aid to ordinary
  Africans and communities.  Amounting to some $200billion according to
  World Bank estimates these monies exceed both foreign aid and foreign
  investment in Africa.
• Recruiting of African doctors and nurses (BL- Africa’s Brain Drain).  Using Ghana as an
  example it is estimated that the UK has saved £65million in training
  costs whilst Ghana has foregone around £35 million of its training
  investment.
• The sale of Africa’s resources as "giveaway prices"  because rich
  countries "skew their markets through tariffs and subsidies to ensure
  that little value can be added to raw products at source in Africa.
• Subsidies by Western governments for their own produce such as for
  American cotton farmers or European beef farmers which enables them to
  dump their products on African markets at artificially low prices.
• Monies sent to Swiss and other offshore accounts by corrupt African leaders and civil servants. 

Chikezie suggests that Africa "impose its own conditionality" on aid
recipients which would provide a "win-win-win" situation for "African
refugees, Africa and for Western Societies where so many refugees find
themselves today" by relating Africa’s aid to the West to Western
immigration and refugee policies.

In addition to
having the right to safe haven when fleeing persecution in their
countries of origin, numerous African refugees and asylum seekers (and,
of course, people from other parts of the world) actually arrive in the
West with valuable skills and experience. Skills and experience that
could further help prop up Britain’s ailing National Health Service or
NHS, already heavily dependent upon nurses and doctors from
Africa……… Refugee fighting fund - "Live 8419"

and so

With leading African artists relegated to performing in a village somewhere in Cornwall on 2 July we thought it important – some 11 years after apartheid was finally defeated – for African performers to have a presence in London on that day. The excitement will not stop there as African performers at Live8419 will for the first time ever perform the hit song, “Do they know it’s summertime?” written by AFFORD to raise more African aid for Britain. This world exclusive will undoubtedly set the media world alight.

AFFORD do not reveal the lyrics of "Do they know its summertime?" but I am sure they will reflect the true nature of aid as it flows from north to south and south to north.    At their annual African Diaspora and Development Day, AFFORD will focus on enterprise in Africa by mobilizing African diaspora "resources to help create and sustain enterprises, jobs and wealth in Africa."    The catchwords -

"Self-determination, self-help, self-reliance, self-respect and self-confidence"………leading to "the equivalent self-sustaining tree of hope, dignity, fulfilling and rewarding human existence in Africa" AND away from the self-righteous missionary zeal of Live8 where Africa is presented as a continent without "rain nor rivers………..where nothing grows".