Climate Change and Africa

As over 100 leaders converged on Copenhagen last week to address global climate change, this video focuses on Africa.

Inside Africa talk’s to Professor Peter Webster, a leading expert on climate change in Africa and Asia

Source:
Cable Network News, “Climate Change and Africa“, accessed December 21, 2009

Resign, Group Tells President Yar’Adua of Nigeria

…Resign, Group Tells Yar’Adua

From Gordi Udeajah, Umuahia
Nigerian Guardian

The Coordinator of Movement For Change In Nigeria (MCN), Chief Sonny Iroche has suggested it was time President Yar’Adua quit office, voluntarily.

In a statement sent to The Guardian, at the weekend, he said: ” It is time for President Yar’Adua to take a bow, resign his position as President and attend to his health, in the larger interest of Nigeria “.

“There is no doubt the Office of President and Commander-in-Chief of an emerging economy and a fissiparous country like Nigeria is very challenging, daunting and Herculean for even the healthiest of men; not to talk of a man, who from the onset of his presidency, was known to be ill.

“It is an entirely different matter, if, while in office, he suddenly fell ill. Our President was known to be ill ab initio; even as far back at his days as Governor of Katsina State.

” From our corporate experience and practice, new employees are made to undergo medical tests and are issued with medical certificates before they commence work. Not to talk of the President of a country in dire need of an energetic and focused leadership.

” A Nigerian President, at this time of our history, needs all the energy possible to lead Nigeria out of the doldrums. While our prayers and thoughts are with our President and the country, we strongly advise the President to save the over 150 million Nigerians, Africa and indeed the entire world, by resigning.

He prayed God to give the President the wisdom and enablement to do what is right, adding that when he resigns, the Constitution must take its course.

The Approaching End of the Slave-Built Economic Empire

The approaching end of the slave-built economic empire

AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso
Courtesy of the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail

In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney documented the history of the construction of Western capitalism on African slave labour and African raw materials and minerals.

Now, Professor Bernard Magubane has documented the depth and extent of the criminal and racist defamation and dehumanisation of Africa and Africans which the Anglo-Saxons carried out in order to justify to themselves and to the world the African holocaust in slavery, colonialism and apartheid which made capitalism possible.

In Race and the Construction of the Dispensable Other, Magubane gives Africa and the African people a lesson which Zimbabwe needs in 2009.

In the short term Zimbabweans need to unite and defeat the illegal and racist sanctions imposed by the same Anglo-Saxon countries at the invitation of the MDC formations.

But more daunting is the long-term task of cleansing the name of Zimbabwe and Zimbabweans, the name of Africa and Africans, which the Anglo-Saxon powers criminally and falsely defamed with the help of journalists and the MDC formations.

As Magubane demonstrates in his book, Africans still struggle to overcome the demeaning and besmirching fabrications and stereotypes of 400 and 500 years ago.

The main vehicles then were a racist anthropology and a bastardised and racist Christian heresy about the origins and fate of humankind.

Today’s visual and digitalised anthropologist is the imbedded and sponsored journalist.

The false videos, films, web sites and e-mails which this new anthropologist and missionary of imperialism produces are not tucked away in museums and libraries like the tracts from old anthropology; they are beamed raw and direct into hundreds of millions of homes around the world.

Africa is still the butt of a globalised defamation industry which began in slavery.

This means that the MDC formations did not know what they were getting into when they agreed to lie about their own country and their own people in order to justify illegal sanctions and in order to earn sponsorship.

The Herald of December 21 2009 carried a story in which Finance Minister Tendai Biti seems to be surprised that the Anglo-Saxon countries whom the MDC formations begged to impose illegal and racist sanctions on Zimbabwe in 2000 are now using all sorts of excuses to justify keeping the sanctions in place.

The minister would now want the sanctions lifted immediately so that “the economic giant” which is Zimbabwe can emerge and play its rightful role among other nations.

The same Herald story reported that the Minister of State in the Prime Minister’s Office, Mr Gorden Moyo, has also realised now that 40 Zimbabwean companies have actually been “blacklisted”, which really means “whitelisted”, by the same Anglo-Saxon powers as a way of deepening and maintaining sanctions on Zimbabwe.

Then on December 23 the same paper reported that Nestlé Zimbabwe has just closed its Zimbabwe factories because of pressure from the illegal sanctions lobby of which the MDC formations have been a part for the last 10 years.

It is reported that the illegal sanctions lobby has a list of Zimbabwean farms which have been acquired by the State for resettlement as part of the African land reclamation movement.

It is those farms which the sanctions lobby believes should not be allowed to benefit from Western companies doing business here, such as Nestlé.

The intimate information about who was resettled on which acquired farms, just-like the intimate knowledge of who is supposed to be banned from travelling to the West, has been supplied by the MDC formations over the years.

Even MDC-T’s demand to install Roy Bennet as Deputy Minister of Agriculture is meant to facilitate access to intimate information which can be better deployed against Zimbabwe’s land revolution.

This duplicity explains why the MDC formations have not yet joined the majority of Zimbabweans to condemn and defeat the sanctions.

While Minister Biti pretends to condemn sanctions in some of his speeches, his own treatment of the agricultural sector and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe in his 2010 budget has actually served to deepen the effects of sanctions from inside Government itself.

Therefore the two ministerial admissions that sanctions are part of a real economic embargo against the country show that we may have made a little bit of progress from the days when MDC-T leaders used to deny that Zimbabwe was under sanctions.

But The Herald stories reveal a much bigger problem with MDC-T than whether or not its leaders now realise that the illegal sanctions are a real economic war on the people.

This is the bigger problem:

Either the leaders of the MDC formations really believed that the Anglo-Saxon powers were their true and permanent “friends” who loved them and whose interest in Zimbabwe’s affairs was driven by that love, which love would cause them to put leaders of that party in power; or leaders of the MDC formations really believed that the Anglo-Saxon racists really wanted “democracy” in Zimbabwe which would arrive as soon as MDC leaders were sworn into office; or these leaders were so power-hungry that they would do anything to get into office, including inviting sanctions to be imposed on the people.

And now that they are in office, they want the sanctions removed so that they can enjoy the full fruits of office.

But Magubane’s book raises a bigger question: Even if the sanctions are defeated by the people, what are the MDC formations going to do to cleanse the name of Zimbabwe?

It appears the MDC leaders did not understand that they were getting entangled in something far much bigger and several centuries older than the MDC formations and the current myth of democratic change and human rights.

The myth of democratic change, human rights and freedom used by the Anglo-Saxon powers as the reason for the creation and existence of the MDC formations is just one more construction in a long series going back 500 years.

Anyone who understands the damage done through lies against Africa would not want to allow even one more fabrication to be spun against Africa again.

We happen to have entered a period in history when the slave-built Anglo-Saxon economic hegemony of the last 500 years is collapsing.

Zimbabwe happens to symbolise the reality of that collapse because of its direct defiance of Anglo-American intrusion and interference.

Therefore the extraordinary and global attention paid to Zimbabwe in the last 10 years is a particular consequence of global struggles and global history going back 500 years.

That history and its struggles are far much larger than Zimbabwe, far much bigger than President Robert Mugabe and Zanu-PF, far much broader than Zimbabwe’s war veterans and the African land reclamation movement.

That is why the whole world recently gathered at Copenhagen; that is why for the first time in a long time few people are confused as to who the real rogue states are and what havoc they have inflicted on the human race for 500 years.

I have said that the MDC formations do not understand that the democratic change, human rights and global freedom on which they were set up is just but the latest in a series of similar myths constructed in the last 500 years in order to enable Anglo-Saxons to cope with crises.

Let me describe the latest crisis first. It covers the period 1973 to date. In that period:

–Those states whose oil fuelled the Anglo-Saxon empire rebelled by setting up the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec);

–The United States suffered defeat in, and had to pull out of, South-East Asia militarily (1975);

–Although the Arab states were defeated in the Yom Kippur war of 1973 against the apartheid state of Israel, they did demonstrate that Israel could be defeated and Palestinians could be freed if the Arab states all united against the Western imperialist states backing Israel against Palestine.

–The UN General Assembly for the first time recognised as combatants in terms of the Geneva Conventions those African guerillas fighting for national liberation;

–Passage of the International Convention for the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid in 1973 opened the possibility that P. W. Botha, F. W. de Klerk, Ian Smith and their apartheid and UDI killers could be sent to The Hague to face trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Moreover, the Western arms suppliers and financiers of apartheid and UDI could be required to pay reparations to the African nations of the region which is now Sadc.

–As a result of the impending victories of African liberation movements, the Portuguese fascist regime and Portugal’s African empire collapsed.

This freed Angola and Mozambique and opened chances for intensifying the liberation struggles for Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa, leading to the beginning of the end of British hegemony in the region.

–The revolutionary climate created through these events gave the children of South Africa under apartheid the courage to stage the Soweto Uprising in 1976 at a great cost in lives. The brutality of the apartheid regime was exposed on camera to the whole world.

–Initially the response of imperialism came in the form of inquiries and books examining the future of the Southern African region. R. W. Johnson, a professor at Oxford, published How Long Will South Africa Survive. The Carnegie Foundation of the US commissioned a corporate inquiry whose report was significantly entitled South Africa: Time Running Out.

The problem for imperialism was that the inspiration for real democracy, for real human emancipation and popular sovereignty was not coming from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or from the so-called “mature democracies” of the West, who, in fact, advocated “constructive engagement” with apartheid and supplied arms to all the white settler regimes in the region.

Real democracy, human emancipation and popular sovereignty in the region were inspired by Vietnam, Cuba and Algeria and they were materially supported by China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).

That is why, from the point of view of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, time was indeed running out.

So in response, imperialism did what it has done for the last 500 years: adjust its instruments of ideological aggression; design a fresh doctrine of human rights and democratic change; and figure out ways of defaming and dehumanising African freedom fighters as the new oppressors, while baptising the Anglo-Saxon killers and oppressors from UDI and apartheid as the latest champions of human rights and democratic change.

The MDC formations were sponsored in order to advance that Anglo-Saxon agenda.

It’s Not Land Ownership, It’s Utilisation

It’s not land ownership, it’s utilisation!

By Jonathan Kadzura
Courtesy of the Zimbabwe Sunday Mail

THE land reform programme, like the war of liberation, will never die away until total economic liberation is achieved.

The masses of Zimbabweans who fought for the liberation of this country will find their efforts well and conclusively rewarded not for themselves, but for their lineage and generations to come, only when the natural resources of this beautiful country become truly Zimbabwean, and this is exactly what the State President is persecuted for.

The land acquisition exercise is not and cannot be an event.

The world is watching to see if the country will navigate past the numerous landmines on this last stretch of our independence.

To the President, I must state categorically that even God’s only Son, Jesus, was sold for 30 pieces of silver.

Where is the Palestinian population today, again for 30 pieces of silver?

This scenario should not be allowed in Zimbabwe.

The war of liberation was fought on the principle of land recovery, hence the slogan “mwana wevhu”.

The slogan “one man one vote” in fact, meant not only recovering the land, but also the dignity of Zimbabweans.

Do you wish to remember how we were cheated out of our land through sweets and mirrors?

Now cash and cars have replaced the sweets and glasses.

The Fifth Zanu-PF National People’s Congress recently passed a strict and binding resolution that the land resettlement programme is irreversible and can never be reversed.

How practical and how right! This resolution is not and cannot be negotiated.

Zanu-PF must stand steadfast on this God-given principle and at the same time abide by its people-oriented inclination that the masses are the people and that leadership only represents those masses.

This President Mugabe so eloquently put across at the Congress.

It was not only clear but also embarrassing for those who thought that leadership was about people for leadership and not leadership for the people.

That is why the President clearly put it across that leadership must come from the people and that whoever emerges as a leader must, in fact, represent the people.

This is democracy, so he added, to applause from delegates attending the Congress. It is evident that the land reform was people-driven and not Government-driven.

The people in Chief Svosve’s realm were the first to demand their land back. This was just out of frustration.

They felt that after waging the war of liberation, the country had only obtained political leverage, something that meant very little to the people.

The traditional leadership was, in fact, fast in reminding the political leadership that the war was not for important podiums but for our land.

That is why the people — and not Government or the law — led calls for land redistribution.

Both the Government and the law came in the wake of what communities or society had determined.

After the people opened this door, society also expects the politicians and the law to put sufficient and fair instruments in place to govern land occupation and land utilisation.

I am one concerned. Why should millions of hectares of land go to waste because the land is under legal instruments that prohibit newly resettled farmers from getting on with the farming business?

Also the original settler farmer plants nothing because his tenure is equally undetermined.

The net liability in this case lies on the ordinary Zimbabwean who goes hungry because nobody worked the land.

Who gets the blame for this fiasco? Zanu-PF!

In my view, this situation requires an urgent solution and it is easy to get it if only we all work for a common objective.

Ask me.

Now I hear and read that US$31 million will be spent on yet another land audit.

What is it that the past three land audits failed to reveal that must now be unearthed by United States dollars?

What good would that money have made had it been channelled towards the purchase of agricultural inputs or to the private sector?

It is a total waste because all the information required is gathering dust on shelves.

But is the project about land really about the person or the personalities?

Kenya may have answers to these questions.

In my view, we should never wait for other people to show us our mistakes and move on to correct them for us.

The country should rather find out its own mistakes and move on to correct them.

This capacity we have — also another God-given resource in us.

The issue of multi-farm ownership must be openly discussed.

Is the question about how many farms a man holds or how much land is going to waste because nobody is working the land?
Greed is when one sits on a lot of land and never uses it.

If one man has 10 000 hectares of land that is actively producing food and raw materials for the nation, that man again, in my view, must be persuaded to get more land from the lazy people sitting on 100 hectares of land.

I think the issue should be about land utilisation and not ownership.
Some of us prefer being in factories producing yoghurts and chocolates, but the raw materials must be available.

Indeed, everyone is entitled to a piece of land. That is why we have the A1 scheme that may be considered as social or subsistence farming.

Commercial farming must be released to a lot of land and should be allowed to grow openly.

There is another side of the coin where only limited hectares are allowed per individual.

This practice is prevalent in some South American states and the Nordic countries.

The question whether we can measure up to this requirement and whether our circumstance is such that we need similar standards must be fully explored.

At the end of the day, let us not set our bars too high in a manner that turns them into moral impediments to what we need to achieve as a nation.

Again, I am only opening debate on these fundamental issues so that we can bury the idea of tracts of land that are not being used.
As usual, it is time for the family and today lunch is sadza and muboora unedovi. How Zimbabwean!

Western Oil Firms May Not Renew Nigerian Licenses–Shell to Sell OilFields

Daily Trust (Abuja)

Nigeria: Western Oil Firms May Not Renew Nigerian Licences–Shell to Sell Oil Fields

Jibrin Abubakar and Mohammed Shosanya
21 December 2009

Lagos — Western oil companies may not renew their operational licences in Nigeria, as Royal Dutch Shell launched a shake-up of its operations in Nigeria by offering oilfields valued at $5 billion for sale.

This, according to sources is coming owing to their dissatisfaction with the handling of the oil sector by the Nigerian government. They are also concerned about how the deregulation policy will work.

While the National Assembly is said to have promised to pass the Petroleum Bill into law before the end of this month, the date for the take off of deregulation is unknown.

Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total and Chevron, which have dominated Nigeria’s energy sector for decades, have criticised the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB), saying it could threaten billions of dollars of investment if it goes ahead in its current form.

Sources also say they are also concerned about Nigeria’s new oil ally-China. China has offered to invest $50 billion for acquiring 6 billion barrels of oil reserves in the country.

“Chinese people are not buying fields…they want to acquire reserves in Nigeria. Specifically the application was to acquire reserves of 6 billion barrels which we are currently discussing. They are prepared to spend as much as $50 billion,” special advisor to President Umaru Musa Yar’adua on energy matters, Emmanuel Egbogah had said.

Spokesman of the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) Precious Okolobo, however said he could not comment on the matter when contacted on phone yesterday.

But the General Manager, Government and Public Affairs of Chevron Nigeria Limited(CNL) Femi Odumabo told this paper in a telephone interview that his company and other multinational oil companies are currently engaging in discussion with the Federal government and its relevant agencies on the Petroleum Industry Bill and the deregulation policy.

He did not comment on whether or not his company and other multinational oil companies would not renew their operating licence ‘due to the issue at hand’.

“Discussions on the issue are currently ongoing with the Federal government. We are engaging in discussion with relevant government officials and agencies”, he said.

Public Affairs Advisor of ExxonMobil Mr Yemi Fakayejo could not be reached on phone for comments.

Some provisions of the Petroleum Industry Bill specify that NNPC’s main joint-ventures with Shell, Chevron, Total, ExxonMobil, and Agip would also be restructured into independent companies with new management when the bill becomes law leaving the companies with much uncertainty on how the new companies will operate, who will manage them, and how profits will be shared.

At the public hearing for the bill in August this year, Managing Director of Chevron Nigeria Limited Andrew Fawthrop said,”Some of the provisions in the bill are still open to interpretation. It is very important that we clarify that before it is codified”.

Mark Ward, the Managing Director of Exxon Mobil Nigeria, said that the Bill, presently implied that all new planned (upstream) projects would be uneconomical, stressing that his company planned to invest $60 billion in Nigeria over several years. Another multinational oil company has recommended more than 200 amendments to the bill, while others have privately spotted dozens of concerns to the NNPC.

Amidst speculation that western oil companies are refusing to renew their licences, Royal Dutch Shell is auctioning its oilfields valued at up to $5 billion for sale. The auction comes as the National Assembly prepares to pass into law the controversial Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB).

Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, Total and Chevron, which have dominated Nigeria’s energy sector for decades, have criticised the Petroleum Industry Bill, saying it could threaten billions of dollars of investment if it goes ahead in its current form

Shell is the biggest western oil firm in Nigeria, the world’s tenth largest producer, and has had operations here for 70 years.

It is understood that the company recently launched a formal sales process that is being overseen by Ann Pickard, head of Shell Nigeria, Times online report.

“They have been talking about this for a while but it has now kicked off,” said a source close to the situation. “They are inviting proposals and circulating technical data on their fields.” Shell’s decision to reduce its reliance on Nigeria, which was once its primary growth engine, signals a huge shift, Times online report.

For decades it has been a mainstay of an industry that accounts for more than three-quarters of the Nigerian economy. It persisted despite rampant piracy and a long-running campaign of violence by militants against foreign workers.

The growing violence and a souring of relations with the government in recent years led the company to invest billions elsewhere to offset its dependence on the country.

With new projects in the Gulf of Mexico and Qatar near completion, it is understood that Peter Voser, Shell’s chief executive, is now keen to reduce its position in Nigeria.

Sinopec, one of China’s state-owned oil groups, has requested information. It is thought that indigenous companies such as Oando, Nigeria’s largest independent group, and London-listed Afren, could also pick up some fields.

World Oil Demand to Surge in 2010, Says OPEC

World oil demand to surge in 2010

Xinhua

THE world oil demand in 2010 would reach 85,13 million barrels per day (mb/d), increasing by 0,82 mb/d, or 0,98 percent compared to this year, according to the forecast made by Opec in its latest monthly oil market report in Vienna.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has increased the world oil demand by 60 000 barrels a day in the new monthly report in comparison with the monthly report of last month.

While the forecast of world oil demand in 2009 from Opec remained the same as the previous monthly report, or 84,31 mb/d, it fell by 1,62 percent, or 1,39 mb/d compared to 2008.

The latest report said that the demand for crude oil next year in China, which would be firstly out of economic recession, would grow obviously.

It would be expected to increase by 4,5 percent. Besides, the growth rate of oil demand in the Middle East and North America would also reach 3,34 percent and 0,99 percent.

However, oil demand of the Western Europe and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, would be likely to keep declining, in which the Western Europe countries would reduce by 1,37 percent and Japan would even fall by 2,03 percent.

In the report, the demand for Opec crude oil in 2009 was estimated to follow a downward revision from 28,67 mb/d of the previous assessment to average 28,58 mb/d.

However, the report also predicted that demand for Opec crude oil would be expected to be 28,61 mb/d next year, an upward revision of around 10 000 barrels a day from the previous month and representing a slight increase of 30 000 barrels a day.

The upward revision of Opec in world oil demand was based primarily on the overall global economy recovery.

It was expected in the report that the world economy would get rid of decline next year, showing a growth of 2,9 percent from a contraction of 1,1 percent this year.

The economy of OECD-countries would expand by 1,3 percent next year from a contraction of 3,4 percent this year.

The US would also grow by 1,6 percent next year from a contraction of 2,5 percent in 2009.

Opec also estimated in its latest report that, the economic growth of China and India next year would reach 8,5 percent and 6,5 percent respectively.

In addition, the Euro zone economy would also expand from a contraction of 3,9 percent in 2009 to 0,6 percent in 2010. —