Supporting Africans

African Charter Article# 21:  All peoples shall freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources for their exclusive interest, eliminating all forms of foreign economic exploitation.

Summary & Comment: In this opinion piece the author asks whose interests drive the government and politicians in Tanzania and who is at the heart of policy development and formulation when mining corporations enjoy a better relationship with politicians than their electorates do? He argues that mining companies and government Ministers have missed an opportunity "to repair the damages caused and compensate the poor villagers of their looses" and chosen to advance their own interests in the New Mining Bill. DN 

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Being born and bred in a village full of minerals is not a blessing for the people of Tanzania. For the majority of people in this country, minerals have for years become a guaranteed source of pain, destruction of lives and the environment than the Creator originally intended them to be. This is the life and future of each Tanzanian child that is born in the villages surrounded by gold rich mines.

Since the discovery of gold in Tanzania about a decade ago, giant mining companies from both North and Southern Countries have benefitted immensely in the operations while thousands of indigenous subsistence miners have gone jobless. In addition to being brutally evicted from their homes and buried alive, other additional costs that the locals have borne in places like Shinyanga are huge holes in the environment which have translated into a series of unaccountable mining dumps; polluted rivers; destruction of vegetation and alleged corruption in government which has been clearly seen in the lack of transparency to contracts awarded to mining companies and tax revenues.   

Between the years 1995 - 2005 gold exports from Tanzania have increased to US$2.54 billion with AngloGold Ashanti taking US$1.54 billion in their previous financial year while giving back a mean 3% royalty tax for the huge costs that the people of Tanzania continue to suffer with. Local organisations like the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC), Lawyer's Environmental Action Team (LEAT) and others have taken up the people's matter to themselves while being backed by the Christian Council of Tanzania (CCT); Tanzania Episcopal Conference (TEC) and Baraza Kuu la Waislamu Tanzania (BAKWATA), but to this day the plight of the people in these villages remain and their cries have fallen in deaf ears.

Many believe that the gold revenues in Tanzania could be able to solve most of the problems facing the country and be able to finance the National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (MKUKUTA). Some analysts have predicted a tripling income in the mining sector from $100million to $300million by 2014 while veteran activists for economic justice differ with this as just another government-shut-your-mouth incentive compared to what the mining companies make from the country's minerals.   

This year on the Tanzanian Budget Day, the World Bank's Board of Executive Directors has approved an International Development Association credit of USD190 million to support implementation of Tanzania's National Strategy for Growth and Reduction of Poverty (MKUKUTA). This loan aimed at financing the government budget was reduced from an initial indicative of USD200 million and will unfortunately be spent without transparency to the rest of the population as it has always been with other revenue generating means like tax revenues.

Despite a decline in Tanzania's ranking on the Cost of Doing Business and on the World Competitiveness indicators; the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability assessment and the UK Department for International Development's Public Financial Management risk assessment having downgraded Tanzania; its ranking by Transparency International fallen; and the 2008 Country Policy and Institutional Assessment rating, though still relatively high at 3.8, has also been revised downward by 0.1 points. Progress on the government's main private sector development and public financial reform programs has been rated unsatisfactory by development partners as have two other core reforms, namely legal and local government. (Business Desk: 11 June 2009).

"Every year we see increased poverty and under development while parliamentarians get new German imported cars with the old ones still in excellent conditions. This clearly shows that the where the heart of government is...not in the people but themselves." said one of the citizens. As one of the custodians of the Millenium Development Goals which the MKUKUTA programme seeks to achieve, Tanzania is expected to deliver on its undertakings by 2015, but with the huge dependency in debt from World Bank, of which most will go to politicians luxurious benefits, none of these goals will be met.

Minerals in Tanzania are not for Tanzanians benefit but the countries and their citizens whose mining companies operate in Tanzania including Britain; Canada and South Africa. As indicated by the Mining Agreement between Pangea Minerals Limited (a subsidiary of Barrick Gold Corporation) and the government of the Republic of Tanzania for the development of a gold mine at Buzwagi, Kahama, "...it is of extraordinary benefit to Barrick while offering decidedly little to Tanzanians.

The questions still remains as to whether the current cut in the mining sector is fair to the ordinary Tanzanian citizen whom on average would take 500 years to make up the US$9.4million salary package, a Barrick CEO, Greg Wilkins, earns. Can the country be able to provide enough and adequate basic services for its citizens? Can mining ever be accountable if the legislation favours them more than the citizens that voted the government to office? Will the revenue collected ever be able to repair the damages and costs borne by the local communities if the mines can't even allow them the opportunity to generate income by provide services to them, more over compensating them for their loss of lives?

Are foreign loans as granted by the World Bank to finance the country's budget the way to meet the needs of the ordinary Tanzanian? Are they not a guarantee of a continous cycle of debt that even the yet to be born child will have a burden to pay? Are we as a country so kind and generous to give away what is supposed to sustain our children and our future generations - our only inheritance - to rich countries in exchange for loss of lives and poverty? Or we just didn't see it coming? I am intersted to know!

Recently and after a huge outcry by citizens in North Mara and Parliamentarians, Barrick Gold deceided to open up their coffers and make some of their Africa Barrick Gold (BG) company available to the so called 'public'. This comes at critical time when the cards are on the table for the review on the Mining Legislations prior to the general elections in a few months time.

In absence of trustworthy information as to what led to this decision, one can only believe that this more is nothing more than a tactical strategy to buy the top politicians who will in turn have a final say on how the New Mining Bill comes out as a final legislation from Parliament. These custodians of the citizens' well being were part of the negotiation process which has seen the being on the top of the potential buyers list - as newspapers report - even before the public knew on the formation of the new company as well as the structure of its shareholders.

The process- after the same Departmental Heads of Minerals were flown to Cape Town and accommodated for almost two weeks at Barrick's expense to be part of the luxurious Mining Indaba as well as the African Mining Partnership - raises questions of the amount of genuines of their relationship and who's interests drive the politicians and government - citizens of corporates? The proceedes of the sale of these ABG shares of whom the majority of impoverished Tanzanians have no access to, would have been better used to clean up the pollution that the company did in North Mara last year and compensate the villagers for the damages caused and the looses they incured as a result, were it not for the few using it as a guarantee of their lavish lives at the end of their political terms.   

Critically asking again, who's interests drive the government and politicians in Tanzania? Who's at the heart of policy development and formulation if corporates enjoy a better relationship with the political heads more than their electorates do? Is this case in question then and the presence of mineral wealth in the country a blessing to the rest of the polulation?  

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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The NILE, UmojaAfrica and network members. They are included in our material as a reflection of a diversity of views and a variety of issues. Material written specifically for AfricaFiles.

Today the World Bank launched its first “Kenya Economic Update”

The title of this first Kenya Economic Update is “Still standing – Kenya’s slow recovery from a quadruple shock with a special focus on the food crisis”. This title has two meanings. First, the economy seems to stand still as economic growth barely matches population growth. Kenya continues to operate below its potential. Second, Kenya’s economy has weathered

four crises – post-election violence, global food crisis, global financial turmoil, and drought – and is “still standing”.

Kenya has proven particularly resilient to the global financial crisis: Its fiscal position is strong, the financial sector robust, the external sector in balance, and inflation below 10 percent.

The World Bank projects a GDP growth rate of 3.5 percent in Kenya for 2010. In 2009, growth has been driven by services and construction (figure 1). Kenya’s service sector has been traditionally very strong and accounts for 55 percent of the economy. This year, growth in the service sector (+4.5%) was supported by a rebound in tourism (+28 percent) which experienced a record decline in 2008 (-36 percent). IT-based industries have also shown strong growth in phone connectivity (+35%) and internet access (+28 percent). Industry, which accounts for 17 percent of the economy, will grow by an estimated 3 percent,

owing mostly to the booming construction sector (+13%).

For more about the report, please click HERE.

"Is this really how to save Africa?" asks Tanzanian columnist AyubRioba, a day after Bill Clinton has left Africa. "We appreciate generousand humane contributions from people like Bill Clinton," he writes in TheCitizen, a respected Tanzanian national daily paper. "But we [Africans]must also show that we are doing something. We cannot sit just like couchpotatoes waiting for others to come and give us medicine."

"We have been made permanent recipients of aid, funds, scholarships,food, medicine, from developed countries.... And what exactly do we do with allthat aid and assistance and help? Almost nothing. Since we gained independence,almost 50 years ago, we have been receiving aid permanently, and statisticstoday indicate that we are becoming poorer!" adds the columnist.

Outside attention to the continent has fuelled thousands of successfulprograms ranging from eradicating smallpox and reducing infant mortality ratesto helping more children go to school and more farmers get microloans. But,despite the aid, the number of poor people in Africa has almost doubled in thepast decade.

Burdened as Africa is with government debt, trade barriers, droughts, andsickness, some 46 percent of Africans survive on less than a dollar a day.Nearly half of those make do with less than 50 cents a day, according to thedevelopment policy research unit the University of Cape Town in South Africa.According to the United Nations, life expectancy on the continent is falling,averaging just 46 years, in large part because of AIDS.

There are different schools of thought when it comes to explaining Africa'sdecline – and how to stop it.

Mr. Rioba fits squarely in the "governance first" camp, whichargues that the onus is on Africans to better their own governments and behaviour– not on outsiders.

For decades, countries such as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo)under Mobutu Sese Seko received billions of dollars in aid and loans – much ofwhich was squandered by corrupt and incompetent officials.

Against this first camp sits the so-called "poverty first" camp,often represented by Columbia University economist and UN Millennium Projectdirector Jeffrey Sachs, who says the solution to Africa's problems lies intackling poverty, and that this can definitely be achieved with sufficient aid.

A third group believes in aid, but argues it's not the quantity that is problematic;it's the way it has been administered.

If ending poverty were so simple, argues William Easterly, a professor ofeconomics at New York University, why has the $2.3 trillion spent over the lastfive decades not done more? "The biggest difference between Sachs and meis that he thinks aid can end poverty and I think it cannot," he says. "Theend of poverty comes about for home-grown reasons, as domestic reformers gropetheir way towards more democracy, cleaner and more accountable government, andfree markets," he says. Mr. Easterly says aid can certainly help alleviatethe suffering of the poor, but that "the problem with aid is the peopleimplementing the aid projects have weak incentives because they are never heldaccountable for results."

Mr. Sachs, in turn, poses: Is $2.3 trillion really so much? That sum, hesays, is "from all donor countries in the world to all developingcountries for all purposes," which means, if you work it out, around $16per person per year in the developing world.

"To say that aid was gargantuan and that it failed is a cruel joke. Itwas neither gargantuan, nor did it fail when it was applied in good faith fordevelopmental purposes (rather than for the cold war, or to ship US grains orto pay high-priced consultants)," he argues.

Sachs points out that the US spends more than $600 billion per year on thePentagon, and less than one-hundredth of that in help for all of Africa."One day's Pentagon spending would pay for all the bed nets [to stopmalaria] for every sleeping site in Africa for five years," he charges."People are hungry. People are dying. There are countless proven andeffective ways to help, and which can extricate people from poverty in the longrun. The drama is whether American politics can rouse itself to takenote," he says.

In his quest for spreading this message and increasing aid, Sachs oftenturns to superstars, and many have embraced his ideas and his can-do attitude.Bono calls him "my professor." Actor Brad Pitt sings his praises.Madonna is a big supporter, and Angelina Jolie filmed a 2005 MTV special,"The Diary of Angelina Jolie & Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa" thatpromotes his work. Vanity Fair, in its recent Africa issue billed him an"adviser to the UN and movie stars" and a "saviour" ofdeveloping nations.

"Sachs offers very simple, concrete, and measurable solutions tospecific developmental problems," says John Prendergast of ENOUGH, a groupwith a mission to "prevent genocide and mass atrocities" in Africa."He doesn't necessarily have answers to major crises like Darfur andeastern Congo, but he does have important responses to malaria, dirty water,and bad sanitation. That is an important baseline for further socioeconomicdevelopment in the long run."

But Easterly is not impressed, calling Sachs a "messianic crusader who... skilfully uses celebrity and media for the cause." Celebrities"love" Sachs, explains Easterly, "because he promises a hugepayoff to Western aid efforts and describes the problem as easy to solve, ifyou just have a few celebrity videos and concerts." Easterly suggests aiddividends will almost always be modest. The solution requires donors to helpcontinuously and be accountable for results. But he says, that is just"not as ... appealing to the People magazine crowd."

Bradford was recently host to 4 lecturers from Mzumbe University in Tanzania to work on a partnership project and The NILE as a working partner of Village-to-Village UK who are the coordinators of the project was there to greet and to support them and also on the last day that they recieved the certificates presented to them by Dr Anna Mdee of the University of Bradford.

The visiting lecturers where very grateful to all those who supported them during there stay here in Bradford and also very happy to meet a number of Tanzanians (East Africans) who made them feel at home away from home. Dr Anna of University of Bradford, Laim of Village-to-Village and John Ruzibuka of University of Bradford where some of the people the lecturers mentioned in the praises and they promised to work very closely with the groups in bradford as soon as they get back to Tanzania.

We discussed a number of issues including grassroots education, poverty, health among others and also agreed on a number of things to work closely together for the development of the grassroots developmental sector in East Africa.

In rich countries, when economic growth declines by three or fourpercentage points, people lose their jobs and possibly their houses,but they regain them when the economy rebounds. In poor Africancountries, children get pulled out of school—and miss out on becomingproductive adults. In some cases, children die before they have achance to go to school. If the current growth collapse is typical ofthe ones Africa has experienced in the past, an additional 700,000 African children may die before their first birthday.

In short, the effects of the global recession on Africa will be permanent. So the idea that aid may be threatenedbecause of the recession in rich countries seems to have the logicbackwards. Precisely because the effects in rich countries aretemporary, resources should go to places where they may bepermanent. Of course, there are political pressures to spenddomestically. But do politicians in rich countries really think that afew more votes are worth more than the lives of the infants who willdie as a result of the recession? 

Furthermore, the relatively modest sum spent on aid to Africa in thepast decade was at least partly responsible for the continent’s rapidgrowth.  From 1998-2008, aid to Africa was increasing and economicgrowth was accelerating (to over 6 percent in 2007); poverty wasdeclining and human development, especially primary school completionrates and the spread of HIV/AIDS, was improving. African countries hadstrengthened their macroeconomic policies—inflation had dropped to halfits level in the mid-1990s—so that aid was more productive.  Privatecapital was flowing in at a faster rate than in any othercontinent. All of these developments have come to a grinding haltbecause of the global economic crisis—a crisis that was not remotelythe fault of Africans. By increasing aid to Africa, the internationalcommunity has a chance to reverse this trend and prevent a temporaryshock from having permanent consequences.

An illiterate West African tribe known as the Dogon-who live in the Bandiagara Cliffs of Southeastern Mali-startled the scientific world in the 1950s when it was discovered that their priests have had extremely complex knowledge of astronomy for at least 700 years… …Two French Anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, lived and worked with the Dogon from 1931 to 1956 and eventually became so loved and trusted that they were initiated into the tribe. After 16 years of stage by stage initiations, the Dogon called a conference and revealed to these Europeans their intimate secret knowledge of the solar system that was eventually recorded in a book entitled The Pale Fox. The Frenchmen were told that our solar system consists of a fixed star with planets rotating around this star and moons rotating around the planets. They said a force we describe as “gravity” was responsible for holding the planets and moons in place. The Dogon gave names and a complete description of the properties and behavior of the planets, moons, and fixed stars such as Polaris, Sirius, and the Pleiades. Mars, for example, was called “Yapunu toll” meaning “planet of menstruation” perhaps because of its red color. A calendar based on the six positions or phases of Venus determined when the Dogon would plant and harvest their food for best results. However, no aspect of Dogon knowledge has created more astonishment than their description of the properties of the star known as Sirius B (po tolo to the Dogon).

Poor people are poor because markets fail them and governments fail them. That markets fail them is well-known. Failures in capital markets mean that young people cannot get loans to finance their education; imperfect or nonexistent insurance markets mean that poor people will not get decent health care if left to unfettered markets; economies of scale as well as the simple fact that basic services such as water are necessities mean that markets will not ensure that poor people will get the services they need to survive. As Prof. Roy Radner once put it, “When you allocate resources by market prices, you discriminate against poor people.”

To overcome these failures—that is, to protect the poor—governments step in. They finance and provide primary education and basic health care; they subsidize water and electricity so poor people can afford these services. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned government interventions lead to failures of their own. In Ugandan public schools, teachers are absent 27 percent of the time; health workers in primary health centers are absent 37 percent of the time. Only one percent of the money allocated to non-salary spending in Chad reached the health clinics. These “government failures” are sometimes as pernicious as the market failures they were intended to correct. They are also difficult to overcome because various interest groups who benefit from the status quo may resist reform.

One way to overcome them may be to create a debate around these failures, to amplify the voices of the poor, so that political leaders will listen to them. Let us hope this global movement, that is based on information-sharing, debate and discussion, will eventually help overcome both market and government failures so that poor people around the world can escape poverty.

The Minister of East African Cooperation of Tanzania Dr Diodorus Kamala visited Bradford where some of our members had a chance to meet and even discuss with him a number of issues related to Tanzania and East Africa.

Uganda's annual population growth rate is among the highest in the world. Uganda's population explosion is being fuelled by electricity shortages which lead couples to go to bed early and have sex, a minister has said.

"While the rest of the world is working in shifts, we in Uganda are going to bed early," said Planning Minister Ephraim Kamuntu. "Then we complain that the population is growing. Why not?"  More than 90% of Ugandans are without reliable access to electricity, according to Mr Kamuntu.

Night fever Without light or TV for entertainment, couples are forced to retire early, spending up to 12 hours a day in darkness.

Uganda's annual population growth rate is one of the highest in the world - 3.4% - according to statistics from the country's Population Secretariat. 

Mr Kamuntu said this was a major reason why Ugandan living standards remained low.

Speaking in Mukono, at a workshop on the upcoming National Development Plan, he said that improved electricity infrastructure is needed to keep lovers out of bed. Widening access to power would also help increase the efficiency in the country's agricultural sector, he added.

However, ordinary Ugandans were not convinced that the turning off of the lights is what is turning on the nation's couples.  "I don't think that a lack of electricity is the cause of overpopulation. It's because of poverty," said one. "They are bored, they've got nothing to do". 

 "Personally I think it's all about birth control," said another. "People don't use contraceptives. "I think that has nothing to do with people spending a lot of time in bed."