Reconciliation talks between Somalia's transitional government and the country's politically influential Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) stalled in Sudan for a second day on Tuesday (31 October 2006), raising fears that attempts to broker a peace deal between the two rival groups were on the brink of collapse, officials said.

The president of UNITA, the country's main opposition party, Isaias Samakuva, last weekend urged the militants and members of his organisation to collaborate with the government in the improvement of the social conditions of the populations. Speaking at the end of the fourth UNITA Parliamentary Gathering, which took place at Quibaxi village, Dembos municipality of the north-central Bengo Province, Isaias Samakuva pointed the bad state of the roads as the main obstacle which hinders the development of this region.

Repeat elections have been conducted in parts of the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Ituri District following disturbances during Sunday's presidential polls. Speaking on Tuesday (31 October 2006), the chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission, Apollinaire Malumalu, told IRIN that the disturbances had occurred in Fataki, 90 km northeast of Bunia, the main town in Ituri, after a soldier shot dead two polling clerks.

Voting went peacefully in presidential runoff elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo on October 29. And both contenders have promised not to resort to force to contest the results. But there is still a significant threat of violence as the votes are counted. While most observers see the election success as a "moment of hope" for the Congo, there is also agreement that fundamental issues of security, corruption, and governance, as well as how to sustain international funding for reconstruction, are still unresolved.

The poor in Egypt's heaving capital city, Cairo, are increasingly turning to selling cheap products in the street as a means to survive despite its limitations, say specialists. "We have a 'street society' in Egypt. So when families need extra money to survive, street selling is one of the easiest ways to get it,"said Dr Sarah Loza, a sociologist who runs SPAAC, a social policy NGO in Cairo. Street vendors have become a major part of Egypt's large 'informal sector' - unregistered employment without taxes or benefits - which some experts say makes up around 30 per cent of the national economy.

The African Union on Tuesday (31 October 2006) hailed the hailed the generally peaceful conduct of the second-round presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo and called for calm as the vast nation awaits final results. In a statement released here, the AU Commission chairman Alpha Oumar Konare welcomed "the smooth conduct of the second round of the presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo."

The Women, Gender and Development Directorate is organising a Civil Society Organizations’ (CSOs) Consultation from 02 to 03 November 2006 at the AU Commission in Addis Ababa. The purpose of the Consultation, on the role of the CSOs in the monitoring and reporting on the Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality in Africa (SDGEA), is to work out a modality of collaboration between CSO partners and the Gender Directorate in the annual monitoring of and reporting on the implementation of the SDGEA.

Many African countries, including Senegal, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Uganda, Ghana and Cape Verde, have lifted significant percentages of their citizens above the poverty line and might well be on course to meeting the income poverty Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving poverty by 2010, according to a World Bank report.

The informal economic sector in Namibia should not be ignored, as it provides income for at least 133 000 people, most of them self-employed, says a new study. More than half are women, who comprised 53,1 per cent of the 488 people in six regions interviewed by the Labour Resource and Research Institute (LaRRi).

Calling on all parties in the Western Sahara and neighbouring states to cooperate fully with the United Nations mission in bringing peace to the disputed territory, the Security-Council today voted to extend the UN mission for another six months until April next year.

Nigeria’s federal system and politics are deeply flawed, contributing to rising violence that threatens to destabilise one of Africa’s leading countries, says a new Crisisgroup report. Failing to encourage genuine power sharing, they have sparked dangerous rivalries between the centre and the 36 states over revenue from the country’s oil and other natural resources; promoted no-holds-barred struggles between interests groups to capture the state and its attendant wealth; and facilitated the emergence of violent ethnic militias, while politicians play on and exacerbate inter-communal tensions to cover up their corruption.

We are pleased to let you know that Pambazuka News has been voted for a second year running as one of the top 10 websites that are changing the world of internet and politics. The nomination was based on votes cast at PoliticsOnline (http://www.politicsonline.com/content/main/specialreports/2006/top10_20…).

The award was for:

* Highly effective leaders who are making outstanding e-political and e-governmental achievements
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We’d like to express our thanks to all of you who voted for us.

Former South African president Nelson Mandela's lawyer has been accused of profiting from corruption proceeds involving Zambian ex-leader Frederick Chiluba, court documents obtained yesterday show. Iqbal Meer, a partner in the London-based firm Meer, Care and Desai, is among those being sued by the Zambian government for allegedly stealing about £13.5 million in state funds, according to documents.

It was revealed yesterday that President Thabo Mbeki’s office is to fork out R10m for former deputy president Jacob Zuma’s legal fees, despite recent public statements that the matter was still “under consideration”. Two months ago, the Pietermaritzburg High Court heard from Zuma’s defence counsel in his fraud and corruption trial that assistance with legal costs should come from the state, but that at that stage it was “nonexistent”.

Sokari Ekine’s blog, Black Looks () has been nominated for a Best of Blog Award - you can read about it and cast your vote at: http://www.thebobs.com/index.php?l=en&s=1152971093190346SYYAKHHX

FEATURE: With compelling evidence and historical insight, Ike Okonta traces the origins of the Niger Delta Conflict.
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- What is the problem with Madonna adopting a Malawian Child? Why all the fury? Adotey Bing-Pappoe comments on the issue by analysing carefully the possible pitfalls of inter-country adoption
- Dieu–Donné Wedi Djamba considers the options of bringing lasting peace to the Democratic Republic of Congo
- Patrick Bond argues that the idea of microcredit, which won Muhammad Yunus the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, is based more on hype than substance.
PODCASTS: Pambazuka News publishes two more podcasts: SACTWU research speaks about the impact of WTO regulations on job losses, and Tajudeen Abul Raheem speaks about Castro's illness
LETTERS: Readers respond to recent articles
BLOGGING AFRICA: Sokari Ekine, still blogging from South Africa, comments on the Reporters Without Borders report on the 2006 “Worldwide Press Freedom Index”
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Links to news on Sudan, Somalia, Chad and Nigeria
HUMAN RIGHTS: Minorities defend their right to organise
WOMEN AND GENDER: Maternal deaths worry WHO
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Niger’s Arabs to fight expulsion
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Kabila, Mobutu’s son sign pact to form government
DEVELOPMENT: Privatisation threatens small-scale miners
CORRUPTION: Inquiries turned gravy trains
HEALTH AND HIV/AIDS: Child deaths from HIV/AIDS to keep growing
EDUCATION: Government Urged to support e-learning in schools
RACISM AND XENOPHOBIA: HSRC’s Habib denied U.S. entry
ENVIRONMENT: Poachers close to wiping out hippos
LAND AND LAND RIGHTS: No need for Zim-style land grabs in South Africa
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INTERNET AND TECHNOLOGY: Employmint.co.za challenges recruitment model
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Muhammad Yunus is the founder of Grameen Bank which has promoted microcredit for millions, loans to women too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. He is the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for “…efforts to create economic and social development from below.” But there is more hype than substance, says Patrick Bond, behind the claim that micro-credit schemes have been effective in poverty alleviation. There is ample evidence to challenge the claims for the alleged benefits of micro-credit programmes.

What sort of dogmatic free-market ideologue would use poor people’s (often socially-constructed) desire for credit to justify shrinking the already beleaguered welfare policies of wretched Third World states?

Consider this outlandish claim: ‘I believe that “government”, as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a “Grameenized private sector”, a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.’

Grameen is Bangladesh’s ‘barefoot bank’ specializing in group loans to low-income women. And the Vanderbilt University-trained economist who made that statement, Muhammad Yunus (in his autobiography Banker to the Poor), just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yunus immediately announced to a Dhaka press conference: ‘Now the war against poverty will be further intensified across the world. It will consolidate the struggle against poverty through microcredit in most of the countries.’

Yet this seemingly benign, three-decade old attempt to foster entrepreneurship amongst impoverished women has attracted intense grassroots – and also professional – criticism.

Not surprisingly, the establishment press loves Yunus, nearly as much as do Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Financial Times made this argument, backed by no evident research: ‘Microfinance has played a central part in Bangladesh's success in reducing poverty by almost 10 percentage points over the past five years, to 40%, a rate that puts Bangladesh on track to meet its Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015.’ Moreover, ‘Grameen's business model is in rude health.’

The Wall Street Journal profiled Yunus on its front page five years ago: ‘To many, Grameen proves that capitalism can work for the poor as well as the rich,’ having ‘helped inspire an estimated 7,000 so-called microlenders with 25 million poor clients worldwide.’

Yet looking more closely, the Journal’s reporters - including the late Daniel Pearl (senselessly beheaded by Islamic extremists) - conceded the prevalence of Enron-style accounting. A fifth of the bank’s loans in late 2001 were more than a year past-due: ‘Grameen would be showing steep losses if the bank followed the accounting practices recommended by institutions that help finance microlenders through low-interest loans and private investments.’

A typical Grameen gimmick is to reschedule short-term loans that are unpaid after as long as two years, instead of writing them off, letting borrowers accumulate interest through new loans simply to keep alive the fiction of repayments on the old loans.

Not even extreme pressure techniques - such as removing tin roofs from delinquent women’s houses, according to the Journal report - improved repayment rates in the most crucial areas, where Grameen had earlier won its global reputation amongst neoliberals who consider credit and entrepreneurship as prerequisites for development.

By then, even the huckster-filled microfinance industry felt betrayed: ‘Grameen Bank had been at best lax, and more likely at worst, deceptive in reporting its financial performance’, wrote leading microfinance promoter J. D. Von Pischke of the World Bank in reaction to the WSJ revelations. ‘Most of us in the trade probably had long suspected that something was fishy.’

Agreed Ross Croulet of the African Development Bank: ‘I myself have been suspicious for a long time about the true situation of Grameen so often disguised by Dr. Yunus’s global stellar status.’

Several years earlier, Yunus was weaned off the bulk of his international donor support, reportedly $5 million a year, which had until then reduced the interest rate he needed to charge borrowers and still make a profit. Grameen had become ‘sustainable,’ self-financing, with costs to be fully borne by borrowers.

He had also battled backward patriarchal and religious attitudes in Bangladesh, and his hard work extended credit to millions of people. The secret was that poor women were typically arranged in groups of five: two got the first tranche of credit, leaving the other three as ‘chasers’ to pressure repayment, so that they could in turn get the next loans.

But at a time of new competitors, adverse weather conditions (especially the 1998 floods) and a backlash by borrowers who used collective power of nonpayment, Grameen imposed dramatic increases in the price of repaying loans. And it is here that Grameen Bank’s main philosophical position – ‘We consider credit as a human right’ – was reduced merely to an argument for access, not affordability.

In that regard, Yunus is entirely different from all the rights-based social movements which have demanded ‘rights’ in terms of free lifeline access to healthcare, education, housing, land, water, electricity and the like.

‘Microcredit is an almost perfect case of a phenomenon that has come to characterise much of development assistance - a widening gap between reality and propaganda,’ argued microfinance consultant Thomas Dichter in a SA Institute for International Affairs publication, ‘Hype and Hope: The Worrisome State of the Microcredit Movement’: ‘Much of Africa offers an infertile context for borrowing as the only customers available to the poorest are other very poor people. In such infertile economic contexts, the people at the bottom are by definition the ones who “need” credit the most, but can do the least with it.’

Dichter continued, ‘In part because of what has been aptly called “microfinance evangelism”, the prospect of significant returns from microcredit made available to solid enterprises has become less likely. This is because those who can really leverage a small loan are not the poorest or the most destitute… An additional limitation is that many microcredit clients are reduced to “copycat” behaviour, everyone selling the same thing, and more sellers saturating the market as more microcredit is made available. In this sense, expanding microcredit can actually lower incomes.’

What about the impact Yunus has made on his home turf? In Bangladesh, according to Dichter, ‘Microcredit is such a common development intervention that many people borrow from one project to repay another. In that context, even if a woman borrower increases her volume of sales by 100% say from 10 bunches of bananas to 20, she is still limited by her inability to add any value to what she sells, limited by her low skills, and the copycat pattern that almost always prevails at the low end of the informal sector.’

Although criticism of Grameen ‘is still a minority view’ and Yunus performed ‘miracles’ in rolling out credit to the masses, according to Munir Quddus, who chairs the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Southern Indiana, the hype needs more investigation than apparently was given by the Nobel committee: ‘The very nature of setting up groups leaves out the very poor who would be perceived by fellow members to have no ability to generate income and therefore high risk.’

Quddus continues: ‘Others have pointed out that micro-credit simply deepens the exploitation of the women since the rates of interest charged by the bank in real [after inflation] terms are quite high; consequently, credit often worsens the debt situation and gives the husbands even more leverage.’

Gaining leverage over women – instead of giving them economic liberation - is a familiar accusation. In 1995, New Internationalist magazine probed Yunus about the 16 ‘resolutions’ he required his borrowers to accept, including ‘smaller families’.

When New Internationalist suggested this ‘smacked of population control’, Yunus replied, ‘No, it is very easy to convince people to have fewer children. Now that the women are earners, having more children means losing money.’

In the same spirit of commodifying everything, Yunus set up a relationship with Monsanto to promote biotech and agrochemical products in 1998, which, New Internationalist reported, ‘was cancelled due to public pressure.’

As Sarah Blackstock reported in the same magazine the following year: ‘Away from their homes, husbands and the NGOs that disburse credit to them, the women feel safe to say the unmentionable in Bangladesh – micro-credit isn’t all it’s cracked up to be… What has really sold micro-credit is Yunus’s seductive oratorical skill.’

But that skill, Blackstock explains, allows Yunus and leading imitators ‘to ascribe poverty to a lack of inspiration and depoliticize it by refusing to look at its causes. Micro-credit propagators are always the first to advocate that poor people need to be able to help themselves. The kind of micro-credit they promote isn’t really about gaining control, but ensuring the key beneficiaries of global capitalism aren’t forced to take any responsibility for poverty.’

Though I have never been to Bangladesh and have only discussed these problems with Yunus once (more than a decade ago when he visited Johannesburg), microfinance gimmickry certainly did damage in Southern Africa.

For example, in 1998, when the emerging markets crisis raised interest rates across the Third World, a 7% increase imposed over two weeks as the local currency crashed drove many South African borrowers and their microlenders into bankruptcy.

The highest-profile local proponent of microcredit is First Lady Zanele Mbeki. But her Womens Development Banking project has not only financed rural women, according to the oil company BP, a supporter. It has also made ‘investments in high-growth businesses’ such as Ceasars Gauteng and ‘Siza Water Company, the first privatised water company’ in KwaZulu-Natal – both of which, arguably, are counter-examples of poverty eradication.

Next door in Zimbabwe, a $66 million flood of World Bank financing during the 1980s (in lieu of land reform) revitalised a rural microfinance sector initiated under late 1940s racist Rhodesian rule. The Bank program ultimately reached 94,000 households. But within a decade, the result was a peasant default rate of 80% in the impoverished ‘Communal Areas’ (equivalent to apartheid Bantustans).

Repayment affordability was a huge factor, since a typical lender’s overhead and collection costs represent 15-22% of the amount of a small loan, including incorporation of a 4% default rate. In Zimbabwe, servicing loans of even just a few hundred US dollars represented enormous burdens when, according to one Agriculture Ministry survey in 1989, the average net crop profit per hour of labour was just $0.15.

Michael Drinkwater’s detailed study of central Zimbabwe showed that ‘improving farmers’ access to credit has placed many of them in serious difficulties’ compounded by ‘an overzealous launching of a group credit scheme’ and the ‘doubtful viability of high cost fertiliser packages’ inappropriate for the erratic climate. ‘The increase in credit use means farmers have to market more to stay solvent... At the household level it is commonly debts not profits that are on the rise.’

To address the crisis, in 1991 the World Bank unsuccessfully promoted even more Grameen-style group credit, albeit with the caveat that ‘Zimbabwe’s experience to date with group lending has not been favourable. The organisation of groups is initially expensive and time-intensive’, and ‘major problems have become apparent.’

Not far away, in Lesotho, anthropologist James Ferguson studied a 1975 World Bank report that guided the country’s development strategy: ‘In a “Less Developed Country”, where the cash economy is on such a precarious basis, there must be [according to the Bank] “a conspicuous lack of credit for the purchase of farm inputs,” and it is obvious that “credit will play a critical role in all future major agricultural projects.”’

Rebutted Ferguson, ‘It is never explained exactly why the need for credit is so critical. It is true that most Basotho invest very little in agriculture probably due to their intelligent appreciation of the low potential and high risks of capital intensive farming in Lesotho but this is usually not a matter of being unable to obtain the cash to make such an investment. Most families have access to wage-earnings or remittances, and this money most commonly comes in large lumps which could easily be used for agricultural inputs, but for the most part is not. Yet in the “development” picture, the need for credit is almost an axiom.’

Ugandan political economist Dani Nabudere has also debunked ‘The argument which holds that the rural poor need credit which will enable them to improve their productivity and modernise production.’ For Nabudere, this ‘has to be repudiated for what it is ? a big lie.’

Even from inside the World Bank these lessons were by then obvious. Sababathy Thillairajah reviewed the Bank’s African peasant credit programmes in 1993 and advised colleagues: ‘Leave the people alone. When someone comes and asks you for money, the best favour you can give them is to say “no”... We are all learning at the Bank. Earlier we thought that by bringing in money, financial infrastructure and institutions would be built up ? which did not occur quickly.’

But not long afterwards, Yunus stepped in to help the Bank with ideological support, as it rejuvenated microfinance with a $200 million global line of credit aimed at poor women in August 1995, just prior to the Beijing gender conference.

The global justice movement’s Attac group has an excellent Oslo branch, which last week published a new book, Economic Apartheid. Its members pointed out to me that that Yunus was strongly supported by his friends in the Norwegian ruling class, including a former top finance ministry bureaucrat and leading officials of Telenor, Norway’s phone company. Telenor owns 62% of GrameenPhone, which controls 60% of Bangladesh’s cellphone market.

At a time when the centre-left Norwegian government has a high profile for partially cancelling illegitimate Third World debt and threatening to defund the World Bank, both of which are applauded by local activists, the people who make these decisions were conscious of how important it is for Norway to project the possibility of capitalism with a human face.

The question is whether they looked hard enough at conflicts generated by credit, thus negating the meaning of the Nobel Peace Prize – and not for the first time.

• Patrick Bond is director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His most recent book is Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, available from Zed Books and UKZN Press.)
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org/

The issue of Madonna adopting a Malawian Child made worldwide news. Human Rights groups have protested the adoption, claiming that it is against the law for a person who is not a Malawi resident to adopt a child from their country. Adotey Bing-Pappoe deals with the issue by analysing carefully the possible pitfalls of inter-country adoption.

What is at issue?

How is one supposed to begin to un-pick the Madonna adoption issue? Is there an issue to be un-picked at all? An individual with means has adopted a child from a poor family who was living in an orphanage. What is the problem? Presumably unless one has an objection to adoption in principle, this should not cause one to lose any sleep. So why the fuss?

First, we only know about the story because it is Madonna - an ‘international superstar’. What Madonna does is newsworthy. It has provided us with an opportunity to discuss something that may have been very common for all we know. We are now able to express a timely opinion about it. But what exactly do we have an opportunity to express an opinion about?

David Banda is a one-year-old African child who has been living in an orphanage since he was two weeks old. His father placed him there because he felt he was not able to look after him. Before doing so, we can assume that he had exhausted all possible avenues of caring for his son from within the extended family. David’s grandmother supported his decision and has said so publicly. However, there is a suggestion that one of David’s uncles does not support the adoption. But was he party to placing David in the orphanage? We may want to criticise David’s father and those family members who were responsible for placing him in an orphanage but do we really have the right to? In any event that is not the issue. Additionally, one can assume that by placing him in an orphanage, David’s father understood that he was making his son available for adoption by a family based inside or outside Malawi, with all that that would entail.

Then along comes Madonna who for reasons we do not know, wishes to adopt a child. We do not know if she is willing to adopt any child or is instead committed to adopting a particular child, perhaps an African one. There are of course children in England, where Madonna is currently domiciled, awaiting adoption. Why Madonna did not adopt one of these children we cannot say. But of course the fact that there are children in England needing adoption is not a reason for someone resident in England to adopt one of them. If Madonna had tried to adopt a child in England before commencing the process of adopting a child from Malawi what was the result of that effort and why? But let us assume that she had not and that for reasons of her own, she wished to adopt a child from Africa or even more specifically, from Malawi. It could be argued, with some plausibility that to adopt a child from Africa is in some way more worthy or morally justified than adopting one from England. Children in African or Malawian orphanages are more likely to remain there un-adopted, and are more likely to have a harder time of it than a child so left in an English orphanage. Even if David had been adopted by a family in resident in Malawi, few such families would have been able to give him the material opportunities that an average family from England would be able to offer, let alone Madonna’s. Finally, life expectancy in Malawi is 39. Surely this is reason enough to justify seeking to adopt a child from an African or Malawian orphanage? In Madonna’s words, she wanted to “open up our home and help one child escape an extreme life of hardship, poverty and in many cases death". Certainly this cannot be said about children living in orphanages in England.

Undue process?

The current bone of contention is whether or not the inter-country adoption regulations in Malawi have been adhered to. Because there are no adoption agencies in Malawi, all adoptions are dealt with by the Ministry of Gender, Youth and Community Services. Penston Kilembe, director of child welfare in that ministry is reported to have said that Madonna and her husband had broken no laws. Nevertheless Maxwell Matewere, Executive Director of the child rights group Eye of the Child, appealed to the Malawian government to make sure the letter of the law had been adhered to. While inter-country adoptions are provided for in Malawian law, the rules are quite demanding. Among other things the adoption process requires not only that prospective adoptive parents must be resident in Malawi, but also that they must foster a prospective adoptive child for 24 months inside Malawi before an adoption may be finalised. The Human Rights Consultative Committee of 67 organisations went further than Maxwell Matewere and went to court seeking an injunction to halt the adoption process on the grounds that Malawi’s adoption rules were being flouted. In the event a magistrate awarded Madonna an 18-month interim adoption order which was used to allow Madonna to take David to England. The action by the Human Rights Consultative Committee is continuing with its action meaning that the legal process has yet to run its course.

But let us put aside for the moment the issue of whether or not the process so far used in this case conformed not only to provisions for inter-country adoption in England, but also to those in Malawi. Assume that all provisions have been fully complied with up to this point, and that they will be, well into the future. We may of course have a view about the legal provisions governing adoption in either country, but let us also put those aside for a moment, and concern ourselves with whether or not existing provisions in the two countries have been adhered to. If so, there would appear to be no reason for the adoption process that has commenced not to proceed to its’ final and ‘successful’ conclusion.

If however, any of the assumptions above prove not to have been met, then clearly this particular adoption will be open to contestation on a number of procedural and technical grounds. If on the other hand these assumptions hold, what then would be wrong with such an outcome, that is Madonna adopting David? Both the child and the family appear to have complementary attributes and needs. So nothing should worry us. But something clearly does worry us, and not a few of us at that.

Possible pitfalls of inter-country adoption

Adopted children who have any living parent and close relatives have to deal with why they were given up for adoption, in addition to the normal issues of growing up. Coming to terms with this involves a process of varying degrees of complexity and duration. In the case of inter-country adoptions, issues of race, class, history and culture, as dictated by circumstance may also have to be contended with. In countries where inter-country adoptions are allowed attempts are made to place children with families from the same racial or cultural background. In South Africa however, perhaps not surprisingly given its’ recent history, this is not permitted by law. In a society where one race is socially, economically, politically or otherwise predominant, it is always problematic when there are trans-racial adoptions. But people clearly have very different views of the issue. For as one commentator observed, David should not have any issues of cultural assimilation, because given his age, he does not have any culture to lose! But he will have to deal with issues of racial identity, as he grows up in Madonna’s white English world. Another unknown to us and possibly to Madonna also, is which permutation from among the following identities intends to bring him up as: Malawian, African, Black, English, or White. She apparently promised to bring David up on his father’s behalf.

In most countries prospective adopters have to show that they have the means to take care of the child they wish to adopt. Thus one has to be of the appropriate class. Now this would not normally be an issue even if there were differences of income between the family of the adopter and the adopted. David will however have to deal with something a little more acute. One of the reasons he appears to have been chosen is his poverty or more precisely the poverty of his family. To what extent will this issue be of concern, as he becomes globally aware? Madonna is not just rich, she is super rich. So there is no question of her being able to look after David in the manner to which she is accustomed. Will David feel guilty about his situation or will he just take it in his stride?

Finally, Madonna is a successful and wealthy American woman born and living in a not entirely post Imperial Britain. She is a citizen of the world’s current Imperial power domiciled in the world’s previous Imperial power. David is an African boy born and, until Madonna was given temporary custody of him and took him to London, surviving in a not so post colonial Malawi. It is possible, though not likely, that these twin facts may be totally irrelevant with respect to how Madonna treats David now or in the future. Malawi had a historically structured relationship with Britain, and has a similar one with the US, though mediated by financial rather than direct political dominance.

It would be extremely unlikely therefore, that it would be a successful and wealthy Malawian woman who would be adopting a poor English or American boy. While inter-county adoptions in America are not forbidden, in England the situation is a little different. The English “Adoptions and Children’s Act 2002 “only provides for inter-country adoption from another country into England. In the words of the Act, the section on inter-country adoption “explains the additional duties of an agency where it is preparing, assessing and approving a prospective inter-country adopter where the UK is the receiving State”. There appears to be no provision for a wealthy Malawian or anyone else for that matter, to adopt and take a child out of England. For some this Imperial-Empire axis of the relationship is one of the main sources of their disquiet.

Nevertheless others argue that even after taking all the above into account, there are not good enough reasons for this and any other ‘David’ not to be adopted by this or any other ‘Madonna’. What matters, they contend, is the care and sensitivity that she will take in bringing him up. The question is, given the structured relationship between the two countries and cultures, how sure can we be that this and any other Madonna will include issues of race, class history and culture within the ambit of their caring and sensitive upbringing?

What hope for the other Davids of Malawi and Africa?

Inter-country adoptions into England and elsewhere are in fact very rare, and make a very small impact on the 48 million children in sub-Saharan Africa estimated to be orphans, 12 million of whom have lost at least one parent to AIDS. Last year there were 313 inter-country adoptions into the UK. In the US there were 22,700, up from around 7,000 in 1990. Of the total in 2005, 441 were adopted from Ethiopia, some by their extended families resident in the US. So, even if there was a rush of Madonnas and Angelina Jolies adopting African orphans (the latter adopted an Ethiopian child last year), this is unlikely to resolve the African orphan problem.

Africa faces many challenges, and coping with orphans is not something that, as a rule, attracts the extended focussed attention of African governments. But institutional life, even in the most caring society, is difficult at the best if times, harder, if the society is also poor. Institutional life in modern day Africa must be bleak indeed. A sizeable chunk of expenditure on orphaned children in Africa comes from agencies financed externally. Madonna is one such agent. It is reported that she has pledged £1.6m to support orphanages that look after the estimated 900,000 orphans in Malawi. Given the size of the orphan problem in Africa, and the problems associated with living in institutions, is it a good idea to institutionalise the solution? One of the concerns of those who have to plan for these things are mindful of, is the impact of so many young people on the future development of Africa. How will African societies cope when so many of its population will be coming into adulthood after years of institutionalised living?

Irene Mureithi, the head of the Child Welfare Society of Kenya, is on record as having suggested that focus instead should be placed on assisting the family to look after the Davids of Africa. In some societies family credit is used to underpin and support poor and socially excluded children. As a first step, the fathers and mothers of the many Davids in Malawi and elsewhere on the continent might be supported to look after their children, using the funds made available by external agents, and one hopes increasingly from internal sources. David has a father. He also has at least one grandparent, and an uncle. Is it too far fetched to think that one of David’s relatives, if they had been provided with regular income support, would have assumed responsibility for looking after David? What benefit cost analyses have been done to see if this would not be a better way of addressing the problem, than institutionalising so many children? The funds coming into the continent to help combat AIDS and its effects might well be better spent on a programme similar to this. Finally, in addition to the extended family, a scheme such as this might be broadened to include people of appropriate standing not related to the potential adoptee. Maybe African governments and concerned others should take ideas like Irene Mureithi’s more seriously.

• Adotey Bing-Pappoe is a development economist and founding partner of Renaissance Associates LLP, a management and development consultancy

• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

As the crisis in the Niger Delta brews, Ike Okonta looks behind the fragile truce between the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and Nigeria's central government.Pambazuka News publishes here the first instalment of a substantive paper prepared following a recent visit to the blood and oil-soaked region.

The fragile truce brokered between Nigeria’s central government and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in April 2006, jerked to a bloody halt on 20th August. On that afternoon, soldiers of the Joint Task Force, a contingent of the Nigerian Army, Navy and Air Force deployed by the government to enforce its authority on the restive oil-bearing Niger Delta, ambushed fifteen members of the MEND militia in the creeks of western delta and murdered them. The dead men had gone to negotiate the release of a Shell Oil worker kidnapped by youth in Letugbene, a neighbouring community. The Shell staff also died in the massacre.

The incident occurred five days after Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s President, instructed armed forces commanders in the region to resort to force and quickly ‘pacify’ the region. This marked a sharp turn-around from the promise Obasanjo gave to representatives of the MEND militia in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, in early April that he would utilise dialogue and carefully targeted development projects to return peace, law and good government to the impoverished Niger Delta.

The streets of Warri, the city where Shell and ChevronTexaco’s western delta operations are based, were thick with tension on the morning of 2 September when Ijo youth converged on Warri Central Hospital in the suburbs to retrieve the corpses of their colleagues and commence the burial ceremonies. The Ijaw are the largest ethnic group in the Niger Delta. The MEND militia draws the bulk of its membership from the Ijaw.

Significantly, there were several prominent Ijaw political and civic leaders at the ceremony. Ordinary people, mainly Ijaw peasant farmers and fisher folk, had left their hoes and fishing nets and travelled from their hamlets in the creeks to pay their last respects to the slain. Spokesmen of the Nigerian government had sought to represent the fifteen militias as ‘irresponsible hostage-takers’ in the wake of the slaughter. But those massed at the hospital that morning spoke only of heroes who had fallen in the battle for ‘Ijaw liberation.’ MEND, it was clear to observers, was firmly embedded in the Ijaw communities from which it emerged in February 2006. MEND continues to enjoy the support of youth and impoverished peasants whose farm lands and fishing creeks – their sole source of livelihood - have been destroyed by half a century of uncontrolled oil production and whose cause they took up arms to champion.

Even so, members of the MEND militia have never seen armed force as a suitable and effective weapon, but only as a tactical tool. They were forced to wield this tool as a last resort after three decades of peaceful entreaty was replied with cynical indifference, from the central government and the oil companies. Leaders of the Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), a civic group with headquarters in Gbaramatu, an Ijaw clan in which MEND’s activities are very pronounced, have served as informal representatives of the MEND militia in negotiations with President Obasanjo and Nigeria’s central government following the abduction of nine foreign oil workers in the creeks of the delta in February. When the author interviewed Oboko Bello, President of FNDIC in Warri in early August, two weeks before the Letugbene massacre, he spoke warmly about the peace meeting he and other Ijaw leaders had had in Abuja with Obasanjo and other government officials on April 5 and 18 2006. He even assured that MEND militants would put their weapons permanently beyond use if the government went some way to address the long-standing grievances of his people. [1]

But it was a sorrowful and stone-faced Bello who addressed his fellow Ijaw during the burial ceremony that afternoon in Warri. He said: “Shell officials were privy to the arrangements Ijaw patriots had made as part of the Joint Investigation and Verification exercise to free the captured company worker and also facilitate the re-opening of the company’s facilities in the creeks. Shell was in direct communication with the commanders of the Joint Task Force, even up to the time our young men set out in their boats to rescue the Shell worker in Letugbene. These young men were not hostage takers. They were Ijaw patriots, selflessly working to repair the damaged peace between the oil company and our people. For this they were ambushed and murdered by soldiers in the service of Shell.” [2]

Oboko Bello ended his one-hour speech on a note of conciliation, arguing that the peace process between the MEND militia and the government begun on 12 March following a meeting between President Obasanjo and prominent Ijaw leaders must not be derailed. But angry voices are rising all over the creeks vowing revenge. These are young men - the volatile, striking arm of the Ijaw political and civic resurgence. Whether moderate voices will be able to rein them in remain to be seen.

For its apart, the central government has adopted a new defiant, militaristic posture, publicly announcing in late August that it was now collaborating closely with the US and British governments to deploy more naval personnel and new hardware to “root out oil rustlers, kidnappers and other undesirable elements from the Niger Delta and the wider Gulf of Guinea.” [3] The MEND militants hunkered down in their heavily fortified redoubts in the creeks, this sounded ominously like an open declaration of war.

FNDIC leaders who spoke to the author shortly after the burial ceremony expressed the concern that the government’s belligerent posture could be an attempt to generate political turbulence in the Niger delta during the general elections, due in April 2007. This turbulence would provide an opportunity for Obasanjo to impose an interim government and extend his tenure beyond the constitutionally stipulated two terms. The elections had been massively rigged in the region (and even more so in the Ijaw areas) by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999 and again in 2003. But FNDIC officials continue to hold out hope that fair elections in which the Ijaw would be fairly represented will provide the solution to the political and economic crisis in which they are trapped. They insist they will continue to work zealously to thwart any attempt to prevent free elections from taking place in Ijaw communities next April.

However, elections in Nigeria and the Niger Delta in particular, are usually turbulent affairs, sometimes descending into the bloody and violent. As was the case in the past, politicians are replenishing their arms caches and resuscitating the network of thugs they rely on to intimidate their rivals, coerce voters to do their bidding, or stuff the ballot boxes outright. The region is awash with small arms and hard cash yet again, and the already volatile cocktail of local resentment of the oppressive activities of the government and the oil companies looks set to blend with guns for hire prowling the creeks and sire another bloody inferno.

Spectacle

The MEND militia and its political sponsors set out in the early months of the year to draw the attention of the world to the parlous condition of the Ijaw people, deploying spectacle as a powerful weapon. Images of armed youth in masks wielding sub-machine guns in the creeks and helpless oil workers at their mercy, squatting in the bowels of speedboats, were beamed to the media all over the world through a skilful use of the internet.

These graphic images generated intense emotions in government circles as well as in the environmental and human rights community in the West. Global oil prices surged and fell with the tone of MEND’s press statements and the physical condition of the captives, whose photographs they put out on the net. But the drama invariably ended on a peaceful note, with MEND setting the oil workers free unharmed. After a spate of armed attacks on the facilities of Shell and two other oil companies in the western delta followed MEND’s emergence in February, the militants and the government seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement that this drama could go on. The actors would be permitted to air their grievances on the world stage, as long as the oil workers periodically taken hostage were not harmed.

The outrage with which the Letugbene murders were greeted by Ijaw youth in the creeks, and rising political tensions all over the country, means there is no knowing whose voice will command allegiance in the coming months: the moderates counselling patience and political participation, or the young hotheads eager to return to the creeks and take on the government and the oil companies they are allied with.

Prelude to an uprising

Before the emergence of MEND, the last time the Ijaw took up arms against the Nigerian government in an organised effort to assert their political rights was forty years ago. In February 1966, Isaac Adaka Boro, a graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, formed the Niger Delta Volunteer Service (NDVS), a militia comprising of several young and educated Ijaw men, and declared the Ijaw-speaking areas of Nigeria’s then ‘Eastern Region’ an independent ‘Niger Delta Republic.’ In an eleven-point declaration of independence, Boro stated that “all former agreements as regards the crude oil of the people undertaken by the now defunct ‘Nigerian’ government in the territory have been declared invalid,” and that “ll oil companies are commanded …to stop exploration and renew agreements with the new Republic. Defiance of this order will result in dislocation of the company’s exploration and forfeiture of their rights of renewal of such agreements.” [4]

Although Federal troops, directed from the regional capital Enugu soon quashed Isaac Boro’s uprising, the twelve-day revolt jolted the nation. It focussed attention on the travails of the riverbank communities of the Eastern Region, and re-opened debate about their demand (since the Willincks hearing in 1958) to be separated from the Eastern Region in an independent state of their own. At the time the Eastern Region was dominated by the more populous Igbo ethnic group, obliging the Ijaw, Ibibio, Ogoni and other smaller groups to band together and ask for a new ‘Rivers State.’

Boro and his two associates, Sam Owonaro and Notthingham Dick, were arrested and imprisoned. Developments elsewhere in the country were soon to alter the fortunes of the three militants in a dramatic manner. Nigeria had been convulsed in political crisis following independence from Britain in October 1960. At the heart of the dispute was the unwieldy three-region structure that the departing colonialists bequeathed to the country, ensuring that the Northern region, led by Muslim feudal lords who had cooperated with British administrators in governing the country, were given the largest slice, bigger than the Western and Eastern Region combined.

Northern politicians were quick to turn this numerical advantage into political and economic rewards, introducing a corrupt and authoritarian mode of rule in the country that enabled them to transfer wealth derived from the south to their own region. In January 1966 five young army majors, the bulk of Igbo extraction, staged a military coup in an attempt to overthrow the civilian government and put an end to the drift towards misgovernment. Several leading politicians and senior Army officers, including the Prime Minister and the Premier of the Northern Region, were killed. The bulk of those that lost their lives were northerners. Casualty figures in the East were light, leading to accusation by northern officers that the January coup was a plot by Igbo officers and politicians to take over the government of the country by force.

Six months later, in July 1966, northern officers staged a counter-coup, attempted to pull the North out of the Federation, but then changed their mind at the last minute (under pressure from the British High Commissioner and the American Ambassador). Leaders of the coup had killed the military Head of State, General Ironsi, an Igbo who had taken over the reins of government after the January coup had collapsed as the most senior officer in the Army. Over three hundred other officers, the bulk of them from the Eastern Region, were also murdered. The coup leaders appointed Yakubu Gowon, a lieutenant colonel and fellow northerner, Head of State and declared that the Ironsi government had been overthrown.

The military administrator of the Eastern Region, Col. Emeka Ojukwu, refused to recognise Gowon as Head of State, and insisted that the late Ironsi’s second in command, Brigadier Ogundipe take over. Relations between the two sides deteriorated swiftly. Fearing that the East was about to secede, the Gowon regime hunkered down in the federal capital Lagos, and split the country into twelve new states in May 1967, two for the ethnic minority groups of the Eastern Region. The Ijaw formed the bulk of the new Rivers State. Ojukwu responded a few days later by declaring the East as the Republic of Biafra, a new state independent of Nigeria. Federal troops invaded Biafra and civil war broke out. Isaac Boro and his compatriots were released from prison by Federal troops when they overran the riverside parts of Biafra. He subsequently joined the Federal side as a major and commanded his own unit under the Third (Marine Commando) Division. Boro was to die in battle a few weeks before the war ended.

The bloody civil war that raged for thirty months and in which an estimated three million people died, was to profoundly alter Nigeria’s political landscape. The war ended in January 1970 with a Federal victory. Although the Ijaw had reason to be content, having secured the new state they had been asking for since the 1950s, the euphoria was to prove short-lived. The central government had passed on to a victorious federal army the bulk of whose commanders were from the now defunct Northern Region. These officers quickly turned their attention to the oil wells of the Niger Delta. In cooperation with civil servants, they pushed through a number of military edicts nationalising the delta oil fields, and altering the formula for sharing revenue. Whereas previously fifty percent of revenue went to the region or state from which it was derived, all the states now had an equal share, with the central government in Lagos keeping the lion’s share for itself.

The new fiscal regime, which now left the Ijaw and the other oil-bearing communities of the Niger Delta at a distinct disadvantage, took nearly ten years to achieve. The process began in the heat of the civil war, when the Gowon government enacted Decree 15 of 1969, removing the control of the oil fields from their states of origin and putting this in its own control. By the time the soldiers handed over to a new civilian government in October 1979, a rash of decrees and edicts had transformed the Niger Delta into a colony whose inhabitants bore the brunt of the oil production on which the national economy relied heavily but enjoyed none of the benefits. These edicts included the 1978 Land Use Act that confiscated the oil-bearing land of the delta communities and put this under the ‘protection’ of the central government.

The new civilian government, under President Shehu Shagari, a northerner, was effete, purposeless and corrupt. This ill-fated Second Republic was overthrown in December 1983 by General M. Buhari. On Buhari’s watch, the portion of oil revenue that went to the Ijaw and the other oil-bearing communities of the Niger Delta plunged to a derisory 1.5 per cent, down from 20 two years previously. Meanwhile Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), the local subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch oil giant, and other Western oil companies operating in the Niger Delta continued to benefit from the legislations that had successfully reduced the delta communities to squatters on their own land. Shell had begun to produce oil in 1956, and now accounted for half of the country’s total oil production of two million barrels per day.

According to the provisions of the legal regime guiding oil production, oil companies were not required to obtain the permission of the local communities on whose land and creeks they explored for, and mined oil. They were only answerable to government officials far away in the capital. All that the oil companies were asked to do was pay ‘compensation’ to local people for crops and other valuables destroyed in the course of oil production. Estimation was largely left to the discretion of Shell officials, and they were quick to take advantage of this and undercut the local people. Environmental protection laws were also flagrantly breached by all the companies, resulting in the devastation of the farm lands and fishing creeks on which the Ijaw and the other communities had relied for livelihood for millennia. [5] Previous decades of government neglect had reduced the delta communities to excruciating poverty, but now their very existence was threatened.

General Ibrahim Babangida overthrew General Buhari in a palace coup in August 1985, and introduced a Structural Adjustment Programme, supervised by the IMF. Ostensibly designed to ameliorate the financial crisis into which decades of corrupt and inefficient government had plunged the country, Babangida’s new economic policies only succeeded in plunging the people into worse poverty. The currency was devalued, hiking up the price of imported necessities. Social services were cut. Millions were retrenched from jobs in government and the private sector.

The already impoverished Delta communities felt the new harsh economic climate particularly keenly. There were neither factories nor government jobs in the region. The enclave oil economy employed a handful of local people even as it left environmental destruction in its wake. Hospitals, roads, piped water, schools, paved roads and electric power were non-existent, and where they were supplied, grossly inadequate. As thousands of Ijaw, retrenched from their jobs in the cities and towns began to stream home in late 1980s, the Niger Delta region began to heave. It was clear to the discerning that a political storm was about to break.

The first storm came in the shape of an attempted military putsch, led by Ijaw and other Delta elements in the Army. In April 1990 these young military officers stormed Dodan Barracks, seat of the central government, and reduced its perimeter walls to rubble with mortars and AK47s. But General Babangida managed to escape, rallied senior commanders to his side and mounted a counter-attack. Outflanked and outgunned the coup plotters surrendered. After a hasty trial, closed to the public, they were executed.

The defiant utterances of the young officers as they faced the firing squad, declaring that they had ‘struck a blow for the oppressed people of the Niger Delta in the spirit of Isaac Boro’, and the economic upheavals in the delta and the wider country that led to this bloody episode, were to prepare the ground for the emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) sixteen years later. [6]

• Dr Ike Okonta is a research fellow in contemporary African politics at the University of Oxford. He is co-author of Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil, Verso, New York, 2003.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

References

[1] Ike Okonta, interview with Oboko Bello, President of Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), Warri, 14th August 2006. In summary, Ijaw representatives asked for the creation of two states, in addition to Bayelsa state, for their people to be carved out of the existing states of Edo, Ondo, Cross Rivers, Rivers, and Akwa Ibom. They also asked that fifty per cent of oil revenue derived from the Niger Delta be given to the communities, that Ijaw businessmen be given a greater pie in the oil industry, and that the central government withdraw armed troops from the region and compel Shell and the other oil companies to put an end to incessant oil spills and gas flaring.
[2] Oboko Bello, ‘FNDIC Presentation During Burial Ceremony of Nine out of Fifteen Illustrious Sons Killed While Serving the Purpose of SPDC in Letugbene Community,’ Presented in Warri, Delta State, 2 September, 2006.
[3] Onyebuchi Ezigbo, ‘Niger Delta: Britain, US Offer Assistance to Nigeria,’ ThisDay, Lagos, 31 August, 2006.
[4] See Tony Tebekaemi, The Twelve Day Revolution, Ethiope Publishing Company, Benin City, 1982, p. 12. See also Kathryn N. Nwajiaku, ‘Oil Politics and Identity Transformation in Nigeria: The Case of the Ijaw in the Niger Delta,’ Unpublished DPhil thesis, Department of Politics, University of Oxford, 2005, for an excellent scholarly study of the political context of Isaac Boro’s revolt in 1966.
[5] For a comprehensive treatment of the social and environmental consequences of oil production in the Niger Delta, see Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil, Sierra Club, San Francisco, 2001.
[6] Ihuoma Iwegbu, ‘Why they Struck,’ National Concord, Lagos, 24 April, 1990.

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