In this issue:

CFR Calls on Bush Admin. To Shift Africa AIDS Policy

Mbeki Calls for Expanded Infrastructure in State of Nation

South Africa Launches 'Expanded Public Works Program'

Mbeki Gov't Initiates Huge Savings Bond Campaign

Southern African Leaders Promote Agriculture

Obasanjo Declares State of Emergency in Central Nigeria

From Volume 3, Issue Number 21 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published May 25, 2004
Africa News Digest

CFR Calls on Bush Admin. To Shift Africa AIDS Policy

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the U.S. arm of the British imperial Round Table, released a 40-page report May 17, explicitly "in response to" President Bush's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief. Bush's program is supposed to provide $15 billion over five years to combat AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

The report faults Bush's program, which it says "will fail to yield long-term success," because: 1) the scale of the program does not match the scale of the problem; 2) a "much more robust health infrastructure will be necessary"; 3) preoccupation only with AIDS leads to neglect of other urgent health problems that enable the spread of AIDS; 4) the Bush program does not address the brain drain of health workers from Africa and elsewhere; and 5) targetting AIDS alone risks a "political backlash against donor insistence on this priority" while, for example, a million Africans die of malaria every year.

It says that "Building health infrastructure is perhaps the most important part of a successful, sustainable attack on the pandemic." Between the lines of the report's recommendations can be seen some concern over keeping control over health policy and health measures in the hands of the Anglo-American powers.

The report, whose senior author is Ambassador Princeton Lyman, CFR's Director of Africa Policy Studies, is a joint project of the CFR and Milbank Memorial Fund in conjunction with George Soros's Open Society Institute. It is online at www.cfr.org.

Mbeki Calls for Expanded Infrastructure in State of Nation

South African President Thabo Mbeki delivered a State of the Nation address before Parliament May 21. Some elements follow:

The June 2003 Growth and Development Summit of government, labor, and business, he said, had agreed that 5% of funds held by institutional investors will be invested in the real economy. He said the agreement should be implemented by the end of 2004.

The rail system will increase its freight capacity by 30% over the next five years; the rail commuter system is investing $32.6 million this financial year to improve commuter transport.

The first ship will dock at the new port near Port Elizabeth (Eastern Cape) by September 2005.

Construction of the King Shaka International Airport and the connecting rail/ocean freight terminal (Durban) will begin soon.

For small farmers, capital funds of $148 million will be made available immediately.

(The Expanded Public Works Program is reported separately below.)

Social security, including grants for those with no means of support, will be expanded. Within two years, 3.2 million more children will become eligible by raising the age limit to 13.

Spending on scientific research and development will be increased in the coming financial year. Construction in the Northern Cape of the largest optical, infrared telescope in the southern hemisphere will be completed in December.

"Within the next five years, all households will have easy access to clean running water. By December this year ... we will provide clean and potable water to the 10th million South African since [apartheid ended in] 1994. During the current year more than 300,000 households will be provided with basic sanitation."

"In the next three years we will spend $2.1 billion to help our people have access to basic shelter."

"[W]e will, within the next eight years, ensure that each household has access to electricity."

The Comprehensive Plan on HIV and AIDS is now being implemented. "113 health facilities will be fully operational by March 2005 and 53,000 people will be on treatment by that time."

"By the end of this financial year we shall ensure that there is no learner... under a tree, [in a] mud-school or any dangerous conditions that expose learners and teachers to the elements. [By then] we expect all schools to have access to clean water and sanitation."

South Africa Launches 'Expanded Public Works Program'

The South African government's most ambitious plan to date to develop the skills of tens of thousands of people kicked off May 18 with the official launch of the Expanded Public Works Program (EPWP). By October, it is expected that 15,000 workers will be employed, working on upgrading rural and municipal roads, municipal pipelines, stormwater drains and paving, fencing roads, community water supply and sanitation, maintenance of government buildings, housing, schools and clinics, rail and port infrastructure, and electrification in all rural and urban areas in South Africa where it does not exist.

At the launch of the EPWP, near Giyani in Limpopo Province, President Mbeki said that corruption in the program would be sabotage, and would not be tolerated. He said, "The colonial and apartheid economy and society were based on land dispossession of the African majority, the use of the landless as cheap and unskilled labor, and the confinement of those described as 'surplus people' in the desperately poor and depressed 13% of our country once described as 'native reserves.'... Our economy no longer needs cheap and unskilled workers. What our society and economy now need are educated and skilled workers....

"All of us, government, business, labor, and the rest of our society, have to work together to ensure that our people get the necessary education and skills [for] the reconstruction and development of our country into one that is as modern as any other in the world."

Mbeki Gov't Initiates Huge Savings Bond Campaign

The South African government hopes to increase its investment in developing the country by issuing savings bonds in small denominations for the first time, according to Business Report May 17. The Treasury will begin May 24 a two-year bond at 9.25%, and 3-year bond at 9.5%, and a 5-year bond at 10%. These are higher returns than low-risk instruments issued by commercial banks. The interest rate will vary depending on market shifts of other government bonds of similar maturity.

The bonds are of the national patriotic kind. They will not be traded in the secondary market, will not even be transferable, and can only be purchased by citizens or permanent residents.

The Treasury estimates 11 million people (a quarter of the population) have money to save. The personal savings rate has dropped from 9% in the 1970s to just above 3%.

A massive promotional campaign is being launched to encourage a savings culture. President Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel have stepped up to buy the first bonds.

Southern African Leaders Promote Agriculture

Southern African leaders are proposing to steadily increase spending on agricultural development to reach 10% of their budgets within five years. Presidents Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Sam Nujoma of Namibia, and other leaders held a one-day summit May 15 to discuss ways of improving food security in the 14-nation Southern African Development Community (SADC). South Africa, DR Congo, and Zambia sent Vice Presidents; Angola was among those sending Prime Ministers.

At the end of the summit, the leaders urged states "to progressively increase financing agriculture by allocating at least 10 percent of their respective national budgets within the next five years."

The declaration also said, "...states have undertaken to ensure availability and access of key agricultural inputs to farmers, such as improved seed varieties, fertilizers, agro-chemicals, tillage services and farm implements, which are critical to increase production."

Namibia's Nujoma called for more irrigation agriculture. "Our region is endowed with many perennial rivers and lakes. However, we continue to be too dependent on rain-fed agriculture. We have not gone far enough to take advantage of the waters of these rivers and lakes. In my view, the few irrigation schemes that exist in the region at present are insufficient," Nujoma said.

The summit was preceded by several technical meetings involving officials of SADC, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Program, World Bank, European Union, African Development Bank, and African Union.

Obasanjo Declares State of Emergency in Central Nigeria

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo imposed a state of emergency in Plateau State in central Nigeria May 18, following a massacre of several hundred Muslims by Christian militants earlier in the month, IRIN reported. Kano, the biggest city in northern Nigeria, remains subject to a night-time curfew, following the reprisal killings of dozens—possibly hundreds—of Christians there the previous week.

Polarization between the oil-rich, predominantly Christian and animist south of Nigeria, and the poorer and largely Muslim north, appears to be increasing. The Nigerian Red Cross estimates that over 600 people perished in the small town of Yelwa when militants from the mainly Christian Tarok people attacked it on May 2 to kill Muslims of the Hausa and Fulani tribes from northern Nigeria. Reportedly, they shot them with automatic rifles, hacked them to death with machetes, and burned them alive in their homes.

On May 18, after repeated accusations that the Federal government was not doing enough to control the crisis, Obasanjo declared a state of emergency in Plateau State, sacking the elected governor, Joshau Dariye, and the state legislature. He appointed a former army general, a one-time Chief of Army Staff, Gen. Chris Mohammed Alli (ret.), as administrator of the state. Obasanjo accused Dariye of not doing enough to check escalating religious violence in the state, which has claimed the lives of more than 2,000 over the past three years. "If allowed to continue, the crisis will engulf the entire nation," he warned.

Another factor behind the conflict is that many farming and herding communities in Nigeria's increasingly arid north have been pressing southward to escape the steady encroachment of the Sahara Desert. This has increased pressure on land in central Nigeria, fueling the conflict.

Meanwhile, leading thousands of peacefully protesting Muslims to Government House on May 12, the chairman of the Council of Ulama, Sheik Umar Kabo, accused the U.S. of sponsoring the killing of Muslims not only in Nigeria but in many parts of the world. He warned that "enough is enough." The Ulama alleged that since the Kafanchan crisis about 17 years ago, "genocide on the Muslim Umma continues unaverted without caution from the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN)."

All rights reserved © 2004 EIRNS