Nigeria called on G8 countries and international financial institutions on Saturday to work to create a unified code of good governance principles applicable to both developing and developed countries. G8 finance ministers meeting in St Petersburg on Saturday acknowledged in their joint communique the importance of responsible management of public finances for achieving stability and growth.

My caring community
You have always catered for me
You have nursed me
Clothed, fed and sheltered me.

You have given generously
To cater for my needs
And the general community
Within my means you have lived.

People run away from me
But you have always stood by me
Hard times have cropped up though
You find it difficult to hold on.

You find it hard to stand by me
Because the generosity is dwindling
People no longer give generously
For you to cater for my special needs.

The hard times have made you turn away
You even threaten to close down
Institutions of my rehabilitation and education
Because nothing is forthcoming.

You forget that the institutions were built
For my sake
Changing them for other programmes
Will prove that you actually do not care for me.

While I was fruitful you stood by me
Now that I am no longer providing
You are shying away from me
My caring community why have you forsaken me.

Why should I carry the cross
For the sins I have not committed
You have always benefited
At my expense
My caring community why have you forsaken me.

Peter Bodo Ong'aro
Secretary General
Kenya Disabled Development Society
P.O. Box 40500
Nairobi 00100 GPO
KENYA.

Website:
Email: [email][email protected] OR [email][email protected]

Copyright ©2006 Peter Bodo Ong'aro

Nowadays a lot of economic jargon is flying around in the news media about internal management, external challenges and external conditions being imposed on poor and developing countries. Blame for economic underdevelopment is generally heaped upon poor governance, corruption and a host of other similar factors. The World Bank, IMF and other donor agencies seem to be the whipping boys for almost all the ills of developing country economies- alleged, perceived, or real.

Thousands of Congolese on Monday took to the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, to demand negotiations that would see the main opposition party included in the country's electoral process. The demonstration came a day after a United Nations Security Council delegation arrived for a visit. Most of the demonstrators were supporters of the Union pour la democratie et le progres social (UDPS), which is led by veteran politician Etienne Tshisekedi and is boycotting the 30 July elections.

Malawi is one of the countries that ratfied to the African's Women's Protocol in June, 2005. Since then Malawi has created awareness to a number of groups/institutions.

The Ministry of Gender, Child Welfare and Community Services as a National Gender Machinery in Malawi has conducted a number of workshops aimed at creating wareness on the provisions of the Protocol. The following have been sensitized so far

1. Media Houses: almost all media houses
2. NGOs working on gender/women issues
3. Policy Makers particularly Principal Secreatries and Chief Exceutive of Statutory Bodies
4. Parliamentary Caucus on Social Affairs
5. Parliamentary Women Caucus

Future Plans

1.Translation of the Protocol in three local languages to ensure that all stakeholders use the same version without losing sense of the provisions
2. Sensitisation of communities at large

All these have been possible through funding from Joint Oxfam Malawi.

Ministers from across Africa have approved a draft charter on democracy that lays down guidelines on elections and good governance. A two-day meeting concluded with unanimous agreement on the draft document in Congo's capital on Saturday. The draft is to be put to an African Union heads of state meeting in Gambia on July 1 and 2.

When U.N. Security Council members visit the Democratic Republic of Congo on June 11 and 12, they should insist that the transitional government protect the rights of journalists and human rights defenders, who have increasingly come under attack ahead of the coming elections, Human Rights Watch said in a briefing paper released on Friday 9 June.

Migration policy issues have to be coherently examined as a part of development policy. The importance of the interoperability of migration and development policy is also emphasized in several political comments of the European Union (Hague Programme, Strategy for Africa). Functional development policy and development cooperation have a strong impact on problems causing migration.

Chadian President Idriss Déby has instructed his government to open a dialogue with the political opposition in a government decree released to journalists. Before the May presidential elections, President Déby had opposed any democratic reforms, causing the opposition to boycott the poll.

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) has condemned the unjust detention of free speech bloggers and journalists in Egypt. Alaa Seif Al-Islam, a seasoned blogger and APC colleague, is one of four Egyptian online diarists being held in detention for criticising the current regime.

Land and land resources in Africa are increasingly governed by modern tenure systems and less by customary systems. Unfortunately, changing land use and land ownership patterns have not always been accompanied by appropriate reforms in policies, laws, and institutions. Africa must ensure that the current wave of land reform initiatives help to establish needed changes in land rights as well as legal and institutional frameworks.

As the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) prepares to hold its first elections in more than 40 years on 30 July 2006, Journaliste en danger (JED), Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) are warning that a spate of attacks against journalists and human rights activists in recent weeks could foster a climate of self-censorship in the media and deprive voters of important information.

Nigerian riot police in the capital Abuja have sealed the offices of a splinter group of the ruling PDP party, following a split on Friday 9 June. The division occurred as prominent party members opposed efforts to amend the constitution to allow the president a third term in office.

Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, appears to have stepped back from launching a long-threatened anti-government protest against deteriorating living conditions. Addressing a press conference in the capital, Harare, Tsvangirai on Friday 9 June instead presented a "roadmap to legitimacy" - an ultimatum to the government.

Tension is rising in Madagascar ahead of elections scheduled for December, after talks between the government and opposition fizzled out. In a bid to ease the political situation, President Marc Ravalomanana held talks with various parties last month, but the overture was boycotted by the main opposition coalition.

A 20-member advance team of the European Union (EU) force charged with safeguarding the first general elections in 45 years in the Congo has arrived in the capital, Kinshasa, a spokesman for the force said on Thursday. Some 16 EU countries are contributing troops to this force, mandated to support the UN Mission in the DRC, known as MONUC, which already has a 17,500-strong force in the country.

FEATURED: John Githongo discusses democracy and governance on the African continent at the launch of TrustAfrica in Senegal
COMMENT AND ANALYSIS:
- Salma Maoulidi urges deeper understanding of the HIV/Aids pandemic in order to “deal with why it is and is allowed to be”
- Hein Marais on how the costs of the HIV/Aids pandemic in South Africa are being displaced on the poor
LETTERS: On the historian and his struggle
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Is Olusegun Obasanjo all out of luck? Tajudeen Abdul Raheem thinks so
BOOKS AND ARTS: Shailja Patel reviews the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), recently opened in San Francisco
AFRICAN UNION MONITOR: News on AU/CSO forum
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: No agreement on UN force for Darfur/US loss in Mogadishu?
HUMAN RIGHTS: Increased trade union repression in Africa
WOMEN AND GENDER: Niger MPs reject women’s rights protocol
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Investigating sexual abuse by humanitarian workers
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Succession crisis looms in Nigeria
DEVELOPMENT: Why NGOs won’t change the world
CORRUPTION: Uganda probe into Aids scam
HEALTH AND HIV/AIDS: Civil society denounces political declaration on HIV/Aids
EDUCATION: The importance of women teachers
ENVIRONMENT: UN expert warns on toxic waste
LAND AND LAND RIGHTS: Harare to evict 4000 black farmers
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: More websites blocked in Ethiopia
ADVOCACY AND CAMPAIGNS: Misfortune500 launched
PLUS: Internet and Technology; e-Newsletters and Mailings Lists; Fundraising and Useful Resources; Courses, Seminars and Workshops; Jobs.

* Read last week’s special edition on trade and justice by clicking on Comment by sending mail to [email protected] or online at www.pambazuka.org

Hein Marais reviews the HIV/Aids pandemic in South Africa, describing how “the costs of Aids are being socialised, deflected back into the lives, homes and neighbourhoods of the poor”.

Shelve the abiding fiction that disasters do not discriminate - that they flatten everything in their path with “democratic” disregard. Plagues zero in on the dispossessed, on those forced to build their lives in the path of danger. Aids is no different. In South Africa, where at least five million people are living with HIV, the epidemic is entangled in the circuitries that determine the distribution of power and privilege.

The mainstays of South Africa’s efforts to fend off the impact of the HIV/Aids epidemic are anti-retroviral (ARV) therapy provision and home-based care. While vitally important, each in current form also expresses the kinds of prevailing inequalities that warp society.

Today, of the estimated one million South Africans in need of ARVs, only about 200 000 are receiving such therapy - half of them through the private health sector, which is accessible to a small minority of South Africans. According to Statistics SA, only about 15% of South Africans (and a mere 7% of black Africans) belong to medical insurance schemes.

The bulk of ARV provision will have to occur through the public health sector, which is being pummelled by Aids. According to research by the Human Sciences Research Council in 2003, Aids was responsible for about 13% of deaths among health workers between 1997 and 2001 - when the wave of Aids mortality was still beginning to crest. Yet the need for well-trained health personnel has never been greater. Completing the rollout of the government’s ARV programme will require an additional 3 200 doctors, 2 400 nurses, 765 social workers and 112 pharmacists in the public health system by 2009. Need far outstrips supply.

Meanwhile, care needs surge. At the turn of the century, researchers were already finding that almost one in two patients in public medical and paediatric wards was HIV-positive, and that their hospital stays were almost twice as long as those of non-Aids patients. Staff workloads and stress mounted accordingly.

All this is overlaid with broader inequity. A large share of South Africa’s gross domestic product - about 9% - goes to healthcare. However, the spending occurs in a two-tier system. About 60% of the funds pay for the healthcare of the 15% of South Africans with private medical insurance. Annual per capita expenditure on healthcare in the private sector is almost six times larger than that in the public sector, and fully 80% of specialists and at least 60% of general practitioners now work in the private sector. As a general rule, income determines who gets what sort of healthcare.

It’s obvious that in an epidemic this severe, some form of home- and community-based care is vital; otherwise the sheer volume of care needs would swamp the public health system. This has been an important element of the post-1994 overhaul of the health system. In theory, by creating a “continuum of care” that links contributions and resources from the public health system and others, home- and community-based care would boost the quality, scale and sustainability of the care effort.

The reality is rather more profane. Most of the burden of Aids care is being displaced into the “invisible” zones of the home - and onto the shoulders of women.

As practiced, Aids care in South Africa today relies on retrograde notions of womanhood and domesticity, casting women in the roles of bearers of children, nurses of the frail, guardians of the hearth. Women oblige with extraordinary stoicism and courage. But that does not disguise the fact that home-based care, as currently practiced, codifies and exalts the rampant exploitation of women’s labour, financial and emotional reserves.

This form of value extraction subsidises the economy at every level from the household outward, yet remains invisible in political and economic discourse. If nothing else, home-based care lays bare the coercive subtext that nestles in the notion of “mothers of the nation”.

But life, and the struggles to guard it, go on. Patients and their care-givers must subsidise many aspects of care provision, and bear the costs of not receiving the levels of care and support they require - the consequences of which spill across households and families in the forms of stress, trauma and depression.

Although thrust into the roles of mediators, counsellors and saviours, care-givers often are unable to provide things as basic as pain-killers or a meal. They typically admit to feeling overwhelmed and alone, buckled by emotional stress and fatigue. Aids stigma poisons these experiences even further.

Home-based care appears to be a more “realistic” or “affordable” option because its true costs are hidden, deflected back into the domestic zones of the poor. In doing so, it adheres to the same polarising logic that defines our society.

Not only is this unjust, it also undermines the sustainability of care provision in the face of a crisis set to continue well into the future. Aids is meshing with the routine distress endured by millions of South Africans - but to pummelling effect, as it intensifies those hardships, and drives an even thicker wedge between the privileged and the deprived.

Supported by consistent but modest economic growth, infrastructure development and service delivery have improved markedly since 1994 - but on a scale that does not match mushrooming needs, and on terms that bow to the logic of the market.

With access to secure, paid employment at a premium, and institutionalised forms of support deficient, the poor have to absorb shocks themselves. Their margins of safety are wafer-thin. Savings are very low, debt is high and access to medical and other forms of insurance rare. For many millions of South Africans, a regular, living wage is a comparative luxury. According to the 2005 Afrobarometer survey, four in 10 respondents said they went without food or were unable to buy medicine they needed, three in 10 couldn’t afford to pay for water, and six in 10 went without an income at some stage in the past year. African women are hit particularly hard.

At the institutional level, Aids will leave its mark as higher morbidity and mortality rates translate into increased absenteeism and personnel losses - trends already vivid elsewhere in Southern Africa. Especially vulnerable are those sectors of the state and civil society most closely involved in the reproduction of “human” and “social capital”.

Aids mortality now ranks among the top causes of staff losses in the public education system - which says something in a sector already racked by low morale. More than half the educators polled by the Human Sciences Research Council in 2005 said they intended leaving their jobs. Training capacity lags far behind need, with management and administrative skills replenishment especially weak.

In such a context, Aids is likely to aggravate dysfunction in the public school system. The effects could spill wide. If basic education suffers, the springboard for higher education and skills training weakens - to unhappy effect in an economy that has been geared to rely more heavily on a strong skills base. Channels for quality educational advancement will of course be available - to those who can afford them.

What might this mean for inter-generational social mobility? If the quality of public school education deteriorates further, against a backdrop of continuing marginalisation of the poorest households - and of overall polarisation - social mobility will be hobbled, trapping more in the mire of chronic poverty. Whether South Africa can avert such consequences will help decide what kind of society future generations will inherit.

Overall, Aids will corrode institutions’ capacities to provide predictable, consistent and acceptable standards of service. Already saddled with hulking workloads and compromised capacity, the police, correctional and judicial services seem especially vulnerable to additional debilities. So, too, the many community-based organisations that play vital welfarist roles at local level - many of which rely on a few key individuals.

How does this tally on the bottom line? It seems indisputable that the epidemic will affect the economy - but how and to what extent is not easily gauged. Some estimates seem almost to trivialise the effect of Aids by suggesting a negligible effect on national economic output. Other projections anticipate severe damage.

The disagreements stem from the fact that the estimates rest on varying assessments of the epidemic’s demographic impact, the channels along which Aids affects the economy, and the nature of those effects.

Such bird’s-eye views of economic impact carry some illustrative value, but they provide little substantive insight. As usual, the devil resides in the details. And it’s there that one encounters further evidence of the uneven and discriminatory impact of Aids.

A handful of major companies have introduced high-profile ARV treatment programmes for some of their employees, and some also emphasise prevention. Most companies, though, seem to be taking Aids in their stride. They have considerable leeway for deflecting the effects of the epidemic - and they’re using it.

Companies continue to shift the terms on which they use labour, a trend that predates Aids but is having a huge effect on working South Africans’ abilities to cushion themselves against the repercussions of the epidemic.

For more than a decade, companies have been intensifying the adoption of labour-saving work methods and technologies, the outsourcing and casualisation of jobs, and cutting worker benefits. The effects have been particularly harsh on workers in the middle and lower skills tiers.

Medical benefits are now customarily capped at levels far too low to cover the costs of serious ill health or injury. Companies have been cutting death and disability benefits, limiting employer contributions and requiring that workers pay a larger share of the premiums for the same benefits. A mammoth shift has occurred from defined-benefit retirement funds to defined-contribution funds (the latter offering scant help to workers felled, for example, by disease in the prime of their lives).

The net effect has been a constant paring of real wages and benefits for those South Africans with formal employment - at a time when they and their families are at increased risk of severe illness and premature death. Recall that we’re talking here about those workers with relatively secure, and probably unionised, jobs. Left to fend for themselves are the masses of “casual” workers, and the unemployed.

In such ways, the costs of Aids are being socialised, deflected back into the lives, homes and neighbourhoods of the poor. This amounts to a massive, regressive redistribution of risk and responsibility. These sorts of adjustments are enabling many companies (particularly larger ones) to sidestep the worst of the epidemic’s impact. But many thousands of enterprises lack that evasive agility.

Smaller firms, especially those that rely heavily on the custom of poor households, will be hit hardest, to say nothing of informal retailers, spaza shops and “microenterprise”.

The Aids epidemic meshes with the social relations that reproduce inequality and deprivation, generating a glacial, miserable crush. Aids unmasks the world we live in, and underlines the need for drastic change that unreservedly favours the dispossessed. In a society in which millions are impoverished in the midst of abundance, this crisis demands nothing less than a new strategy - and struggle - for realising social rights.

At the very least, this implies an upgraded social package that slots into an accelerated programme of redistribution and rights-realisation. It would include safeguarded food security, the provision of affordable (that is to say, decommodified) essential services, job creation and workers’ rights protection, and the alignment of social transfers to unfolding needs.

Shirk that duty, and current trends will harden and intensify. For hundreds of thousands of people, Aids is already dismantling the hope of a better life in the most incontrovertible way possible: by killing them. It threatens to steal from many millions more the very idea of a different, better world.

* Hein Marais’s new book, ‘Buckling: The Impact of Aids in South Africa’, is published by the Centre for the Study of Aids at the University of Pretoria. It can be ordered at [email][email protected] or http://www.csa.za.org

* This article was first published in the Mail and Guardian newspaper (http://www.mg.co.za) It is reproduced here with kind permission of the author and the Mail and Guardian

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

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