Month: April 2005

ANC Attacks Anti-Corruption Investigators

The African National Congress in February stepped up its public war of words with an anti-corruption unit — dubbed The Scorpions — designed to ferret out abuse of power in the South African state.

The Scorpions, whom are modeled on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations, have been focusing on a large travel-related scandal in which Members of Parliament are accused inflating their travel expenses to scam upwards of $2 million.

Rather than getting to the bottom of that scandal, however, the ANC has predictably chosen to attack the investigators.

ANC chief whip Mbulelo Goniwe, for example, accused the anti-corruption unit of timing its announcements to harm the ANC, noting that The Scorpions had released a press release about the extent of the travel scandal on the same day that Thabo Mbeki delivered his State of the Nation address,

I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think it’s a planned, desperate kind of act of vengeance to really undermine parliament and create this impression that members of parliaments are by definition cowboys and crooks.

The ANC has even taken to accusing members of the anti-corruption unit of having been spies for the apartheid-era government.

Mbeki himself promised a thorough investigation, not of corruption but of the anti-corruption task force, in February.

Of course the winds were taken out of the whole “we’re being persecuted” claim when five ANC Members of Parliament plead guilty to fraudulent billing of their travel expenses. Presumably, they were framed or were apartheid spies working with The Scorpions all along to discredit the ANC.

Sources:

Mbeki to probe elite crime unit. The BBC, February 14, 2005.

ANC’s anger over cowboy ‘smears’. The BBC, February 4, 2005.

ANC to act against convicted MPs. iAfrica.Com, March 18, 2005.

Ethiopia Still Requires Food Aid, But Situation Is Improving

Its amazing what peace can actually do. In Ethiopia, crop production in 2004 was 24 percent higher than in the 2003, and 21 percent higher than the average of the previous five years according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program.

Ethiopia is not yet food self-sufficient, however, but it is slowly edging to that point. In 2004, for example, Ethiopia required 965,000 tons of food to help prevent hunger among 7 million people who lacked enough food. This year it will only require about 387,500 tons of food to aid 2.2 million people who are at risk of not having enough food.

In part, that food aid is needed due to drought in the eastern and southern parts of the country. But in the northern and western country — with Ethiopia’s war with Eritrea over for the moment — farmers were able to concentrate on improving yields with better seeds and fertilizer.

Source:

Ethiopia’s crop production up 24%. The BBC, February 2, 2005.

Boutros Boutros Ghali Predicts Regional Water Wars

In an interview with the BBC, former United Nations Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali predicted that conflicts would soon arise between countries in the Nile basin over rights to water that flows through the Nile.

Egypt has long been the largest user of water from the Nile, but countries upstream are coming closer to more intensively using that water, which Boutros Ghali predicts will lead to conflict between Egypt and countries such as Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya.

Boutros Ghali noted that Egypt’s population has more than tripled over the last 50 years and is still growing, putting heavy demand on Nile water resources. Boutros Ghali told the BBC,

The security of Egypt is related to the relation between Egypt and Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya and other African countries. The real problem is that we need an additional quantity of water and we will not have an additional quantity of water unless we find an a agreement with the upstream countries which also need water and have not used Nile water until now.

But the BBC interview failed to mention a major overriding problem with water in the Middle East and Africa — it is almost universally mismanaged, since it relies on bureaucracies setting water targets and policies rather than letting markets dictate the true cost of water.

In Egypt, for example, 85 percent of water goes to agriculture, and agricultural water use is micromanaged to the point where government committees plan out a year in advanced which crops will be allowed to grow where and how water will be allocated among them. Not surprisingly the result is large-scale inefficiency and misallocation of water resources.

Mismanagement of water is almost universal, even in countries such as the United States which don’t yet have severe water problems. But places like the Middle East and Northern African simply cannot afford to protect industries or individuals from the true cost and scarcity of water. Unfortunately, doing so is likely to prove very politically unpopular, but one can always hope that developing countries might prefer transparent markets in water to conflicts between states that may lead to larger problems, while leaving the underlying problem uncorrected.

Source:

Ex-UN chief warns of water wars. Mike Thompson, The BBC, February 2, 2005.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Argues for Large-Scale Debt Relief for Africa

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown made waves in January with his announcement that Great Britain would seek large scale debt relief for poverty-stricken African nations. Brown said that ultimately his government hoped to negotiation 100 percent debt relief for such nations.

On a trip to Africa, Brown signed a debt relief deal with Tanzania in which the UK agreed to pay 10 percent of Tanzania’s repayment debts to the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank. The annual payments on Tanzania’s debt amounts to about 3.5 million pounds.

In exchange, Tanzania agreed to use the money it would have spent servicing its debt on health, education and poverty reduction for its people.

The BBC quoted Brown as saying,

We make this offer unilaterally, but we are now asking other countries to join us. Our wish is to have 100% debt relief and we hope that America, Japan, France and other European countries will follow great Britain in this effort. We hope that we are in a position to get all other countries to sing up to a new package of debt relief.

. . .

What we offer Tanzania today we offer to the whole developing world tomorrow. Although there is no international agreement yet, Britain will relieve those countries still under the burden of this debt by paying our share — 10 percent — of their payments to the World Bank and African Development bank in their stead.

Later in his trip, Brown announced that Great Britain was canceling 80 million pounds in debt that Mozambique owes the UK, and would also pay 10 percent of Mozambique’s debt as well. In all, Great Britain plans to reach the same deal with 70 developing countries at a cost to itself of 1 billion pounds annually.

Not everyone, however, thinks that debt relief is the ultimate solution to poverty in the developing world. Former UK international development secretary Clare Short warned that although the debt relief was a good start, it should not be seen as a “mystical solution” to poverty. The BBC quoted short Short as noting that relieving debt in this case is simply a roundabout way to giving foreign aid, and will not solve the problem of “failed states” such as Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to Short,

Debt relief and aid alone without really strong action to end conflict, arms supply, start building order, the basic institutions of a state, leave the poor outside the whole development system.

Short also noted that there are very poor countries that don’t have significant debt, and that if the World Bank or other institutions began writing off developing country debt, there would be less money available to give to other countries that may need it.

It’s kind of odd given the notable lack of success over the past 30 years to see Great Britain suddenly reach the conclusion that throwing money at developing world poverty is the way to solve the problem. Certainly, the UK actions are likely to create short term improvements as many of the aid programs of the 60s, 70s, and 80s did, but making those short term benefits lead to long-term transformation is going to be a lot trickier.

Sources:

Brown’s Pound 1bn Africa debt pledge. The BBC, January 14, 2005.

Brown wipes Pound 80 m Mozambique debt. The BBC, January 15, 2005.

Burundi Introduces Tax to Cope With Famine

In January, Burundi imposed a special tax of 8 percent on the salary of ministers and lawmakers and a 2 percent tax on lower-level civil servants in an effort to raise money to forestall famine in northeastern Burundi.

More than 650,000 people faced severe food shortages in the Burundi provinces of Muyinga and Kirundo due to drought. At least 100 people were reported to have died since November 2004 due to the food shortages.

In some parts of those two provinces, there have been effectively no crops due to the drought since April 2004. Additionally, disease apparently wiped out the normally drought-resistant cassava crop. According to the BBC, many people in the region are crossing into neighboring Rwanda for work and then bringing back food to feed their families.

Providing enough food to forestall more deaths could cost upward of $50 million.

Sources:

Burundi approves new famine tax. The BBC, January 13, 2005.

Burundi battles with food shortages. The BBC, January 19, 2005.

Plague Outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo

At least 61 people died in February during an outbreak of the pneumonic plauge in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

About 350 people who worked in a mine in the northern Oriental province were infected with the disesae earlier this year, with at least 61 of them ultimately succumbing to the disease.

The pneumonic plague is the rarest and most deadly of the three types of plague. Unlike bubonic and septicimic plague, the pneumonic form of the disease can be passed from person to person through infected droplets transmitted by coughing or sneezing.

According to the World Health Organization, it is almost always fatal if not treated, but responds well to antibiotics. Unfortunately, the Democratic Republic of Congo is still a relatively chaotic place after the end of its four-year civil war in 2002, and more than 2,000 people who worked at the mine quickly left and dispersed after the outbreak of the disease became widely known.

Plague, of course, used to be a major worldwide killer, famously wiping out a significant proportion of the European population in the late medieval period. The World Health Organization reports that in 2003 there were only about 2,000 cases of the disease worldwide, but almost all of those occurred in Africa.

Sources:

Plague outbreak kills 60 in Congo. The BBC, February 18, 2005.

DR Congo plague outbreak spreads. The BBC, February 23, 2005.

Plague Outbreak in Eastern Congo. Cynthia Kirk, Voice of America, March 2, 2005.

Deadly Plague Outbreak Feared in Congo . Craig Timberg, Washington Post, February 18, 2005.

Locust invasions on West Africa. IRIN News, December 2004.