A continent of cheap labour and little regulation

This article reports that a "uranium rush" seems to be under way, based on the assumption that nuclear power might fill the world's current energy gaps in Namibia . Namibia's uranium oxide is exported in its raw form and enriched in countries with uranium converters such as France, the US, Canada and China.For almost 30 years, Roessing was the only uranium company in the country.A second uranium mine, Langer Heinrich, became operational in 2007 and 40 exclusive prospecting licenses and 12 mining licenses had already been issued by September 2008.

Exposure to even relatively low levels of radiation over a long period can be extremely harmful to the health of workers and communities living around uranium mines.Several workers who spent long years working at uranium mines developed serious health problems.Cancerous strains are commonplace as workers are exposed to dust and radon gas daily and thus develop diseases such as TB and lung cancer.Although mining companies usually deny any responsibility and refuse to compensate workers, there is increasing evidence of a link between uranium mining and workers' health problems.

Uranium mining uses an enormous amount of water.
In a recent article in The Namibian, the writer pointed out that the proposed uranium mine by the Canadian company Forsys Metal, would use 1 million litres of water each day.Situated on the Valencia farm in the Erongo region, the mine would consume in only three months the amount of water that the current users in the area would consume in 36 years.Given that all existing and envisaged uranium mines are in the Namib desert, one needs to ask if it is wise to spend Namibia's most scarce resource - water - on mining operations that may only bring short-term benefits.

Besides using huge amounts of water, uranium mining also leaves large craters as it relies on open-pit operations.Once mining activities cease, the huge holes remain.Furthermore, radioactive dust particles may be blown over many kilometres.

It is telling that Canadian and Australian mining companies seem to spearhead the new rush for Africa's uranium. Despite high quality uranium deposits in their own countries, they are focusing on Africa's uranium resources, with Niger, Malawi, Tanzania and Namibia the main targets. There seems to be only one explanation for this paradox: labour costs are higher, and environmental restrictions are more stringent in Australia and Canada.

America Needs African Mercenaries

An American private security company put 'help wanted' ads in Namibian local papers in September 2007, hundreds of Namibians lined up to apply for the non-combat security guards positions on offer in Iraq and Afghanistan. A firm called Special Operations Consulting-Security Management Group (SOC-SMG) announced a recruitment drive through the adverts in local newspapers. The Nevada-based private security company clients include the US Army and the US Marine Corps. Namibia’s independence war ended nearly 20 years ago, but the experience gained by many soldiers during the conflict has made the country a fertile hunting ground for private security companies seeking recruits for the world's 21st century wars.

Alex Kamwi, executive director of Namibia Ex-Freedom Fighters and War Veterans Association said most former soldiers "were just educated at the battlefield, with an AK-47." As a result, he said, many veterans were unemployed, had few marketable skills and were "very, very poor...They were really rushing, in large numbers, to get a job – because they are suffering!" said Kamwi. About 35 percent of Namibia's about 2 million people are unemployed.

The private military and security companies in support of US-led efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly looking to Africa for so-called "third-country nationals (TCNs)", who are playing a growing role in the military-backed operations there. An estimated 155,000 contract personnel are currently in Iraq in support of the US occupation. About 30 percent of them are TCNs, according to the US Department of Defence. These contractors are used for a range of jobs such as non-combat security contractors hired to guard personnel and convoys, as well as static installations, including bridges and pipelines. TCNs with more advanced skills are sometimes employed to train military personnel, participate in de-mining operations, or interrogate detainees.

The growth of the private security industry is increasingly targetting developing countries where many TCNs have valuable conflict experience, said Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a Washington DC-based trading group for private security companies. Should the US government only hire Americans to do these jobs, the costs would just be insane

"They have some knowledge about risk mitigation, and about what is risky in a war zone. Most people in the world don’t know what this is. People in Africa do. I mean a lot of people have been in these areas and they have this amazing amount of experience they bring to their jobs," Brooks said.

Hiring personnel from Africa also has another attraction. "They tend to be much cheaper than Americans or Westerners – maybe by a factor of 5 or 6," Brooks told IRIN. "Should the US government only hire Americans to do these jobs, the costs would be just insane."

What is inexpensive by Western standards can be a pay bonanza in Africa and other developing countries. In Namibia, word of mouth spread that the security jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan would pay about US$550 per month, or about 10 times the monthly wage of a local security guard.

"When somebody is poor and trapped in this poverty, what choice do they have?," said Phil ya Nangoloh, executive director of the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) in the capital Windhoek. Ya Nangoloh said profit-driven recruiting companies were looking only for the cheapest labour, which means they can exploit the desperately poor and uneducated. "Some of them do not have even have access to newspapers or television to know what is going on there with the suicide bombers," Ya Nangoloh said. "Some of these people looking for jobs may not even know where Iraq is. They may think that it is a country next door."

Amnesty International USA’s Business and Human Rights Unit told IRIN that some TCNs effectively work in conditions of "indentured servitude," in which they sign employment contracts that last for three to five years, "but spend their first year just paying off travel expenses,"

Migrating capitalism

The Malaysian textile company Ramatex came to Namibia in 2001. The N$1 billion project (about US$127 million) was the first large-scale industrialization investment in the country. It decided to close down its operations -- a move that will destroy 3,000 jobs. The company had been provided with an incentive package that included subsidized water and electricity and a 99-year lease exemption for the 65-hectare site. The government provided the site with electricity and sewerage infrastructure to the tune of N$100 million (almost US$13 million). It was exempt from corporate tax, import duties on imported inputs, value added tax (currently at 15 percent), and transfer duties. It was permitted to repatriate their capital and profits while enjoying freedom from exchange controls. It could hold foreign currency accounts at local banks.

Ramatex arrived in Namibia to benefit from the United States' Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). AGOA provides preferential access to certain imports, such as clothing and textiles, from developing countries in Africa. Namibia started the Export Processing Zones (EPZ) in 1996 with wide-ranging incentives to create an accommodating and profitable environment for manufacturers exporting to markets outside the Southern African Customs Union. The state-owned Offshore Development Company (ODC) promotes and markets Namibia's EPZ to facilitate export-led industrialization.

Five years ago, the workforce stood at nearly 8,000. In 2005, a subsidiary shop called Rhino garments closed down. Ramatex's cotton spinning and ginning plant closed shortly afterwards and the workforce shrunk to 3,000. The company's products were mainly exported to the USA, but its production and sales volumes were never made public resulting in persistent questions about the company's claim that it was making a loss . Now it is to close down completely with the loss of those remaining jobs . The non-suspecting workers, mostly young women, found the main gate to the textile company, which is situated on the outskirts of Windhoek closed when they reported for duty. Instead of clocking in, the workers were greeted by a heavy presence of security forces, which included members of the Special Field Force, City Police, Namibian Police officials and traffic officials who had cordoned off the area . The Namibian Police feared that the angry workers might vandalise the property and steal some of the materials and sewing machines belonging to the company. The police were also concerned that if they allowed the workers in, it would be very difficult to remove them from the premises afterwards. After long hours of negotiations, the workers were allowed to collect their personal belongings in small groups that the Namibian Police could easily control.
The Namibian Labour Commissioner told workers that he would ensure that Filipino and other Asian workers would also receive just payment and treatment during negotiations. In the past, Asian workers at the company have allegedly been quietly deported when labour issues between them and the company became a problem.

Prime Minister Nahas Angula said Ramatex has acted in bad faith because it had earlier agreed with the Government that it would give one year's notice before closing down but instead only gave a month's notice. "They cannot just wake up in the morning and say they are leaving." he said

According to researcher Herbert Jauch of Namibia's non-governmental Labour Resource and Research Institute (LaRRi), ordinary workers usually lose out as transnational companies make use of EPZ regimes in countries for a short while, only to quickly disappear again to the next.
''Transnational corporations like Ramatex are highly mobile and exploit the opportunities created by neoliberal globalization,'' Jauch wrote in a recent study called ''The Textile and Clothing Industry in Sub-Saharan Africa.'' ''There is a need to tackle such companies by questioning the neoliberal global order and by creating mechanisms of democratic control that will ensure an end to exploitative practices and the free reign of capital,'' Jauch stated in the publication.

Over and over again , workers learn the hard lesson that businesses exists to accumulate capital and will forever seek fresh pastures and new exploitation .

Namibia - New Ways of Living Needed

Namibia's land reform programme is a "zero sum game" that merely swaps one form of poverty for another . The Legal Assistance Centre (LAC), a non-governmental human rights organisation based in the capital, Windhoek, said in a report reviewing the achievements so far of Namibia's land reform programme, No Resettlement Available, that "most resettlement farms are not doing very well; in fact, it is not apparent that any are."

Namibia, which won its independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, inherited a colonial division of land in which about half the agricultural land is owned by 3,500 white farmers. Farms average about 5,000 hectares in the north of the country and 10,000 hectares in the south, while nearly 1 million black Namibians live on "heavily overgrazed" communal lands. Namibia is an arid country of about 825,400sq km, of which only about 100sq km are suitable for dry [non-irrigated] crop cultivation; it suffers drought in six out of every 10 years with a growing population of about 2 million people . While white commercial farmers were heavily subsidised with both capital and large numbers of livestock by past German and South African colonial governments, resettled farmers have neither, and are left to an impoverished lifestyle which is often as bad or worse than the one they had prior to joining the resettlement programme.

The size of the farms allocated and the agricultural methods practiced were among the problems identified. :-
"Black farmers get smaller units than white farmers held, but remain stuck with the same plan to be livestock farmers . Since even the larger white farms were not very profitable this apportionment is both setting black farmers up to fail, and failing to reconceptualise a new Namibian agricultural order that could both feed the growing populationand provide reasonable incomes to the new black commercial farmers."

The reports goes on to explain :-
"Dividing large farms into units of one-fifth to one-seventh the size of the original farm - being the typical resettlement farm size - not only applies the failed colonial model of cattle farming, but further weakens it, in that farms of such small sizes cannot succeed. The large commercial farm of the apartheid era, an old and inefficient structure of agriculture, is being reproduced in a diluted form."

The Namibian government, like those of neighbouring South Africa and Zimbabwe, has made land reform a central policy tenet, and the government's resettlement scheme has placed 800 farms in black hands in the 17 years since independence . This is about 12 percent of all farms, or less or than one percent a year, so the process will take over 100 years to complete . The report also cited numerous failures in the division and resettlement of commercial farms, from not granting land title and "leaving poor people in some kind of tenant relationship with the government which is not empowering them," to a lack of transparency, the absence of any support for resettled farmers and the overblown bureaucracy of the Ministry of Lands and Resettlement - and the government generally. For example, resettling 9,000 people in 12 years amounts to fewer than 800 a year, hardly more than 125-130 families. Yet it takes a staff of perhaps 1,000 government employees to do this work

The report recommends an overhaul of the agricultural sector, from the "apartheid era" cattle farming, to new farming methods such as "crop cultivation and tropical agriculture". Tropical agriculture is usually labour-intensive subsistence farming and cash-crop production, using techniques like moveable cages that confine animals to feeding on weeds, the use of crop residues as litter in the cages, disposal of human waste in deep pits that are later planted with trees, and the use of ashes as fertiliser and in soap production.

Even poorly paid farm workers (an estimated 222,000 people ) , have their basic needs met: they receive a regular salary, are allowed to have chicken , small stock and perhaps even cattle, and live in reasonably good housing. All of this disappears on a Namibian resettlement farm.

By only abolishing just the apartheid racist system it should be obvious to many that the capitalist economic system cannot solve the problems of poverty and production . With the struggle for acquiring political rights out of the way , it is now time for the struggle for a new society to begin .

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