Uganda's ecological problem

Poverty and hunger will continue in Uganda unless the current rate of natural resources depletion is tamed. Agriculture is under attack from long dry spells, high temperatures and soil infertility, which experts attribute to deforestation and wetland degradation, among others.

Ms Almaz Gebru, the UN coordinator who also doubles as the United Nations Development Programme Uganda Country Director, said weather patterns are changing for the worse and there is no way millions of Ugandans trapped in poverty and hunger will be alleviated if natural resources continue to be depleted.

"Poverty and hunger will persist when we do not use our natural resources, including forests, in a sustainable manner," Ms Gebru said in a speech 

64 per cent of Ugandans derive their incomes and food from agriculture.

Protecting oil business not nature

The British government has offered support to a multi-billion pound plan to drill for oil in one of Africa’s oldest national parks. The UN has cautioned against drilling for oil in national parks due to the potential damage to ecosystems and the well-being of people living nearby.

The project, involving British company Tullow Oil; French firm Total and Chinese oil company CNOOC, could see dozens of wells drilled in Murchison Falls national park in Uganda. Tullow, together with its partners, would be investing $8 billion and drilling 500 wells in the three blocks, over the next 25 years. The park is home to one of the last remaining populations of the world’s most endangered species of giraffe, leading to warnings by experts that if the park is damaged the species could be at risk. Damage to the park has already occurred. The most intensive development lies within Exploration Area 1 (EA1), operated on behalf of the group by Total. Seventy percent of EA1 overlaps with the national park, including savannah habitat used by the endangered Rothschild’s giraffe, lions and elephants.

Small scale but irreparable damage has already occurred to the park as a result of a geological survey. An ecological compliance study found 283 instances of damage, 159 of which were found to be “non-restorable”. This included oil leakage; damage to trees and riverbanks and the destruction of termite mounds.

British trade officials have classed Tullow’s operations in the park as an “opportunity” worth over £1bn to UK businesses and have been keen to offer the firm financial backing. The government has held talks with Tullow about providing UK taxpayer-backed loans and insurance for its operations in the country.

Uganda is not the only example of British firms wishing to drill in national parks and other protected areas. British companies hold the rights to explore for oil in national parks and protected areas all over sub-Saharan Africa. Six British companies hold exploration licences covering at least 29 protected sites in eight countries.

This trend is at odds with the position of international institutions.

 A UN Environment spokesperson warned that: “Highly protected areas are protected because of their ecological value or vulnerability. In common with all industrial activity, mineral activity in such areas has the potential to impact this value adversely and/or enhance vulnerability with serious consequences to both biodiversity and human well-being.”

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN has a strict “no-go” policy regarding mining activities in protected areas. Kathy MacKinnon, Chair of IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas said the organisation: “encourages responsible companies not to seek exploration and production concessions within protected areas.”

Irene Ssekyana of Kampala-based NGO Greenwatch Uganda, stated, “It is a very sensitive ecosystem. We’re talking about a globally important area of biodiversity that supports a vibrant tourism industry. The government says they are going to minimise the footprint of the activities, but it’s not very convincing… as long as issues of corruption and governance are not dealt with, I do not think that the ordinary Ugandan will benefit…”

Tullow has refused to rule out drilling in protected areas, although it said it does have a policy against drilling in world heritage sites. The firm holds oil licence blocks overlapping 15 protected areas in Africa, said: “We don’t rule out drilling in protected areas full stop.” According to Tullow 40% of Uganda’s oil lies beneath Murchison Falls national park.

Food Power

As a young university student of agriculture, Edie Mukiibi believed the latest hybrid seeds which promised bumper crops were the answer to improving the lot of maize farmers in his part of Uganda. He persuaded many to buy the seeds, while working part-time promoting them in Kiboga district in central Uganda. But the consequences were "terrible", he said. It was 2007, a year of drought, and the new seeds turned out to be less resilient than traditional varieties. "The farmers lost almost everything - every bit of maize crop they had. When I went back to talk with the farmers I could feel their pain," Mukiibi said. Even worse, the new crops could not be grown with any other crops, so the farmers were left with nothing to fall back on except the bills they had run up for the pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers the maize required, he said. "This is when I started working with farmers ... to diversify their farming," said Mukiibi, now vice president of Slow Food International, a grassroots movement of farmers, chefs, activists and academics campaigning to improve the quality of food and the lives of producers.

Large companies are increasingly taking charge of food production in Africa and pushing for greater quantities of food - but these are not the answer to cutting hunger in Africa, he said. "We need to encourage small-scale producers that they are still important in the world of food," he said, adding that thousands in Uganda have lost access to land bought by foreign companies producing food for export.

“We need to think more about the real causes of malnutrition in developing countries, and we need to realise the problem is not production, the problem is how do we keep the food we have in circulation."

Traditionally, Ugandan farms grow different crops on the same piece of land. Five acres may be planted with coffee and in between the coffee plants, bananas and cocoa are grown, as well as yams and beans for the family to eat, he said. The crops support each other - in times of drought coffee plants extend their roots to banana plants which naturally hold more water, he added. "This is a very, very productive farming system in Africa." 

In Africa, food lost during or after harvest could feed 300 million people, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. People can go hungry in one part of Uganda while bananas are rotting in the fields and in stores in another part.

http://news.trust.org/item/20160923155135-agt73/

Protecting from people and the Sun

This blog has on a number of occasions highlighted the discrimination of the vulnerable albino population. This article appeared in AlJazeera. 

Five of the seven children Mwanje had with Florence were born with albinism, a rare genetic condition where the body is unable, or is limited in its ability to produce melanin, the substance responsible for the colouring in skin, hair and eyes.

"My first reaction when my first son with albinism was born was just shock. I didn't know what to think, but I immediately decided to love him. He was our son," says Mwanje.

But in many families this is not the case. Some keep their children inside all the time, afraid of what neighbours might say, or because they lack knowledge about how to care for a child with albinism. Often, the men choose to leave their wives as soon as the baby is born, arguing that it is not their child.

The myths about albinism in East Africa are many, and they vary between countries, but the general perception of the skin condition remains the same. It is said that a person with albinism holds great power in their body and that if you give a limb to a witchdoctor he will make you rich. It is also believed that they are in fact ghosts and not human. In countries such as Tanzania and Malawi, countless people with albinism have been attacked, and had their arms or legs chopped off with machetes. Many are reported missing. They live in constant fear of falling victim to someone's greed for money.

In Uganda the daily discrimination and lack of support from the government still makes life very hard. In school many children with albinism are bullied and fellow classmates refuse to sit next to them. An inability to see well, which afflicts many with albinism, becomes a major handicap in the classroom. When combined with the usual challenges of getting a good education while attending the local village school, which lacks essential facilities such as books, pens and other supplies, this proves disheartening for the children and their parents. Sun protection cream is like a bottle of gold, a luxury to protect them from the sun, their worst enemy, they can't afford to waste.

More refugees

The United Nations says over 37,000 people fleeing the conflict in South Sudan have entered Uganda over the last three weeks.

"In the past three weeks there have been more refugee arrivals in Uganda than in the entire first six months of 2016," which was 33,838 people, said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a statement released on Tuesday.

The UNHCR added that over 90 percent of the refugees were woman and children as adult males were being forced to join armed groups.

It noted that most of the refugees had fled from South Sudan's Eastern Equatoria region and the capital Juba.

The UN body also stressed that refugee camps in Uganda were being overwhelmed by the surge of people.

Thousands of people have been killed and more than three million forced to flee their homes in the war that started in December 2013, when President Kiir sacked Machar only two years after the country seceded from Sudan.

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/07/26/477071/south-sudan-un-refugees-uganda

Early marriage, early death

Uganda which has one of the world's highest rates of pre-teen and teenage pregnancies as the east African nation struggles to enforce laws to clamp down on child marriages. 300,000 girls every year get pregnant. One in every four girls aged between 15 and 19 fall pregnant, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, and nearly half of girls are married before 18. Ugandan authorities have struggled to enforce laws that set a minimum marriage age of 18.

A study by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2013 indicated that early marriages and resultant pregnancies are the biggest cause of deaths among 15 to 19-year-old girls in Uganda, accounting for 20 percent of maternal deaths. Others of those who survive the pregnancies can suffer lasting complications like fistula and disability.

Nakubulwa Mayi, a senior midwife at Mulago Referral Hospital the biggest hospital in the country, said pre-teen pregnancies posed serious physical and emotional risks to young girls. "At this age a girl should be playing with dolls but not to have to handle a baby," she said. 

Ignorance on risks of child marriage, limited access to education for girls, cultures dictating girls should marry young, and poverty, have all contributed to this growing trend of child marriage in Uganda.

Agnes Igoye, assistant coordinator of the anti-trafficking task force at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said early marriage is a form of sexual and gender-based violence with physical, social and economic effects. "Once married, few girls return to school even if it becomes economically viable," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

A Broken Heath Service

The incidence of cancer is on the rise in Africa. 

Uganda's only radiotherapy machine used for treating cancer is broken beyond repair, the country's main cancer unit says. This leaves thousands unable to get potentially life-saving treatment. The cancer unit is currently talking to the ministry of health to find a way to buy a new machine, but it is not clear when that will happen.

The cancer unit at Mulago Hospital in the capital, Kampala, is now looking for $1.8m (£1.3m) to buy a new machine. It gets 44,000 new referrals a year from Uganda, as well as from neighbouring countries including Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan. 

Around 75% of these may require radiotherapy, the unit's spokesperson Christine Namulindwa told the BBC. 

 Patients are still able to get other treatments, such as chemotherapy and surgery, but if they need radiotherapy, and they can afford it, they will have to travel to neighbouring Kenya.

Uganda and the Panama Papers

The Panama Papers show how an oil  company based in Jersey, a British crown dependency, attempted to avoid paying $400m (£280m) in Capital Gains Tax to the Ugandan government.

 In 2010, Heritage Oil and Gas Ltd realised it would be hit with a huge tax bill and started making efforts to avoid it by moving the country where the company was registered from the Bahamas to Mauritius. Mauritius has a double-tax agreement with Uganda, which in principle means companies pay tax in only one of the two countries. Since Mauritius does not impose any Capital Gains Tax, charged on the sale of assets, this would mean Heritage reduces its bill to zero.

An accountant acting on behalf of Heritage said the move to Mauritius would act as a "second line of defence" in efforts to "eliminate the potential tax charge imposed by the Ugandan authorities". Elsewhere, he was more precise: "We are looking to re-domicile Heritage Oil and Gas Ltd. [HOGL] to Mauritius (primarily due to the double tax agreement between Uganda and Mauritius). HOGL… is due to complete the sale of an asset in Uganda within the next 11 days. "Due to tax reasons emanating from Uganda, the directors have been advised by tax accountants to re-domicile HOGL to Mauritius from the Bahamas before completion."

The legal services head of the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), Patience Tumusiime Rubagumya, told the BBC that the "re-domiciliation of Heritage had tax avoidance manoeuvres written all over it". The leaks, if true, only go to validate the position taken by URA as far back as January 2010." The dispute over the $400m tax bill has been dragging on since 2010 in a lengthy series of court battles in both Uganda and the UK. A Tax Appeals Tribunal heard the case, as the company denied it was liable to Capital Gains Tax on the sale of its assets. While the tribunal ruled in favour of Uganda, Heritage disputed the decision and the case was moved to a court in London and dragged on for months.

In the meantime, the Ugandan government clamped down on the new owners of the oil assets, Tullow Uganda Ltd, and relations between the two started to break down. In an attempt to salvage its business operations in Uganda, Tullow paid the Ugandan government and later successfully sued Heritage to reclaim the money.

In a region littered with mineral deposits of many sorts, and brimming with exploration being carried out by foreign companies, the revelations contained in the Panama Papers highlight the need to tighten tax laws, says Ms Rubagumya. "Base erosion and profit shifting through aggressive tax planning, treaty abuse and double non-taxation requires concerted effort from the revenue authorities and policy makers," she told the BBC. "African countries should therefore close all potential loopholes and stand firm to ensure that tax due is paid." 

Mossack Fonseca, is named as the registered agent of Heritage, whose founder Tony Buckingham is, according to the London-based Guardian newspaper, a donor of UK Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative party.

Uganda - Tightening controls on NGOs

Two weeks after controversially winning a fifth term, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has signed another repressive law which restricts the operations of thousands of NGOs working in the country.

Adrian Juuko, executive director of Ugandan NGO Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum (HRAPF), said activists were worried about provisions that will prohibit an estimated 11,000 NGOs from doing anything that is against “the interests of Uganda” and the “dignity of Ugandans”.

Nicholas Opiyo, executive director of Ugandan civil liberties group Chapter Four said the law promotes “the erroneous view of the sector as a security threat rather than a development sector”, adding under it NGOs required a state-issued permit.

“The use of the term ‘dignity’ threatens organisations working on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) issues,” Juuko told IPS, stressing this clause could suggest that Uganda “would rather maintain its dignity than accept homosexuality”. He said the passage of the legislation “may be another way of reintroducing the nullified Anti-Homosexuality Act as it would equally affect organisations providing services to LGBTI persons or advocating for decriminalisation of same sex relations.” 

“Passage of this flawed bill into law could not come at a worse time,” Asia Russell, executive director of Health Global Access Project explained, adding that “Government threats, harassment and intimidation against Ugandan civil society, media, and the opposition is intensifying. In the immediate aftermath of widely criticised elections, President Museveni is throwing fuel on the fire.”

Uganda's divide

Distribution of Uganda’s Poor.
When it comes to were the poor are most found, Karamoja has the highest percentage of poor people at 74%. This is followed by West Nile at 42%, then Lango and Acholi at 35%, Eastern with 24.7%, Busoga with 24.3%, Bunyoro, Tooro and Rwenzori with 9.8%,; Ankole and Kigezi with 7.6%. Buganda region has the least percentage of poor people; Central two 7.3%, Central one 3.7% and Kampala 0.7%.

Distribution of Uganda’s Middle class. [middle income would be a better description]
The middle class in Uganda is distributed as follows; Buganda has the largest percentage of people in the middle class; Kampala 89%, Central One 64%, Central Two 46%. In Ankole and Kigezi 50% are in the middle class. In Bunyoro, Tooro and Rwenzori 45% are in the middle class, in Busoga 25%, in the Eastern 18%, in Lango and Acholi 23%, in West Nile 17%, and in Karamoja 9%.

Another Crisis Looming

In the remote village of Akuyam, Uganda, Ann Alinga, a mother of five is now plucking wild fruits in a desperate bid to keep her family alive.

“There is nothing to harvest,” the 35-year-old mother said as she surveyed her parched and failing 5-acre farm. “We won’t survive on the shrubs alone.”

In recent seasons, she harvested nearly a ton of grains, enough to her feed her children and raise extra cash for the family’s other needs. But the severity of this year’s drought has written off her sunflower crop and destroyed the harvest across this swath of agricultural land in northern Uganda. For Ann, this year’s drought is only her latest trial. She has only planted crops since her family’s cattle herd was stolen six years ago. She owes a local cooperative about $100 for the seeds that have failed her. She says she has no way to pay it back. After gathering edible leaves and fruits each day to sustain her family, she helps her husband cut and dry brush to sell as firewood, bringing in about 25 cents a day.

“We are so stressed,” Ann Alinga says. “My children may even starve.”

“This would be a harvesting period, but look at what’s there: nothing,” said John Lorot, a council leader near Akuyam. “People need relief food and the time to act is now, not later.”

The damage to food production is spreading across the continent: From Angola to Zimbabwe, officials say more than 30 million Africans will need help to survive the looming tropical dry season after the worst droughts since 1992 slashed this year’s harvest of such staples as corn, rice and beans by half. For many, the impact of this year’s drought has been the most devastating in living memory. The World Food Program agency said this month that two-thirds of households in the region have run out of the food meant to last them into 2016.

Global market turmoil in recent weeks has sent many African currencies down more than 20% against the U.S. dollar, making imports to the continent more costly than ever. That is creating liquidity crunches in Angola, Zimbabwe and South Sudan that are hurting official efforts to supplement poor harvests and driving the prices of staples foodstuffs higher. Staple grain prices have hit five-year highs, according to U.S.-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network.

“Exchange rates are blowing out. That’s pushing up prices,” said Ferdi Meyer, director of South Africa’s Bureau for Food and Agricultural Policy at the University of Pretoria.

This year, foreign donors are focused on the refugee crisis emanating from Syria and Iraq, making it harder to find funding.

“There’s a lot of need out there,” said David Orr, the United Nations WFP’s spokesman for southern Africa. Since December, the WFP has cut food-aid rations in Africa three times.

“Reducing rations is a last resort to ensure we can continue providing lifesaving support,” said Alice Martin-Daihirou, the U.N. agency’s director for Uganda.

Amin, Africa and the World (1976)

Amin, Africa and the World (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

The way to stop understanding of events is to show them as resulting from personal misconduct or mismanagement by those in charge. Had Hitler not been mad and bad, the Second World War would never have happened. Stalin's treacherousness made Russia what it is. But for a succession of weak and untrustworthy leaders, the Labour Party would have brought us all to the Promised Land. This view of history means we are perpetually invited to look at figures idiotic and corrupt, and put all the blame on them. Without doubt they are all as objectionable as stated, but that is not the answer. The high chairs in which these characters sit are provided by capitalism, and at some time of need each appeared to be the ideal occupant.

The special place of buffoon-turned-villain is held at present by President Amin of Uganda. Since his regime began it has been characterized by killings, culminating in the "Makerere massacre" of over 100 students in August this year. It has included the deportation of Asians in 1972, and a series of international incidents; in July there was a confrontation with Kenya, and on the 28th July Britain broke of diplomatic relations with Uganda. There have been attempts at uprisings and to assassinate Amin. On 1st August The Observer had an editorial headed "Getting rid of Amin".

The fact is that Amin's takeover in January 1971 was supported by Israel and favoured by Britain. A lengthy article in The Observer on 15th August recalled that the previous Prime Minister of Uganda, Dr. Milton Obote, had at the end of 1969 introduced a "Move to the Left" policy that was "Britain's reason for welcoming the coup d'état 13 months later". On Amin's accession, the article went on: "The British Government was delighted . . . One of Amin's first acts was to de-nationalize the British businesses taken over by Obote." Israel viewed Uganda under Amin as as an ally against the Arab states. While these relationships lasted, Amin was presented as a not-unsympathetic clown; since they were reversed, the Ugandan regime has been shown as a reign of terror.

Uganda was formerly a British protectorate, and remains part of the British Commonwealth. In the 19th century and up to World War II trade was carried on by a number of European countries and Asian traders; there were thriving cotton, coffee and timber industries, and large stocks of timber were contributed to war production for Britain. The wartime increases in world prices for cotton and coffee brought economic advances and the importation of industrial machinery and this in turn promoted ideas of nationalism. British companies still operate in Uganda — according to a report in The Times on 29th July they include Unilever and the ubiquitous Lonrho group, and subsidiaries of Grindlays, Barclays and Standard banks.

The concern with Uganda and other African states today is their relationship with the conflicting interests of the big powers. In East Africa, Somalia is backed and armed by the Soviet Union. Ethiopia is armed by America, but has officials who talk the parrot-jargon taught by Russia. In June this year the American government provided Kenya with a 44 credit for the purchase of 12 American fighter aircraft. A report in The Times on 20th July said:

In the American view, Soviet and Chinese arms supplies to the African states in recent years have completely altered the balance of power, and this must now be redeemed. Kenya is an obvious starting point.

In the week of Amin's Makerere massacre 98 men were executed in the Sudan for taking part in a revolt supported by Libya and other Arab countries (Times, 6th August) without expressions of horror from the western world.

Amin's support in finance, arms and technical personnel comes from the Arab states, particularly Libya, which is in turn supplied by Russia. In the flare-up between Uganda and Kenya it was said that neither America nor Russia wanted to see a shooting war develop in this part of Africa and had advised caution to both sides and their neighbours. Nevertheless, the balance between Africa and Middle East states and the major powers which "handle" them is like that of the Balkan states and Europe before 1914. It is absurd to imagine that this position would be different if Uganda, Libya and other states had more amiable rulers. In some cases they had different ones, who were made unacceptable by the situation instead of the opposite happening.

The continual threat of war is created by the worldwide working of capitalism. The major powers all want to exploit Africa far more intensely than was done under direct imperialism; at the same time the nationalism of the African countries provides a market for arms production. According to figures in the 1976 Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in the Middle East "where the arms trade had been most conspicuous" nearly 16 per cent of the region's gross product was being spent on military purposes.

The cause of war remains the same: conflicts among the capitalists of various nations over markets, trade routes and resources of production. Of course it is masked by diplomacy and and political motives. The last major war fought more or less openly for markets was World War I. The immediate factors in the modern world are control of strategic points and influence over particular sections, presented as a conflict between "ideologies". Ultimately, however, all wars are economic. The balance of power in Africa is between the growing and aspiring ruling classes of the states there, their deals for aid with bigger nations, and the bigger nations' own need for oil and minerals for commodity production.

In this balance, the grotesque Amin is entirely dependent on his sponsors. The continuation of the Kenyan oil blockade in July could have caused his downfall, and from the viewpoint of his Arab allies he is unreliable and disposable; no doubt their attitude is like Samuel Pepys's — "whether it will be better for me to have him die, because he is a bad man, or live, for fear a worse should come". Meanwhile, workers in Uganda and countless other countries not only under tyrannical regimes but have the prospect of being fodder for wars, in which the enemies are a matter of permutation. This is the result of production for profit. It does not have to go on.

Robert Barltrop

For Ugandan Children Born Of War, The Struggle Continues

Actual combat may have ended almost a decade ago in northern Uganda, but for many women abducted by the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army and the children they conceived in captivity, the war is far from over. Sexual exploitation, beatings, stigmatization and community rejection, lack of medical care and education, and deprivation of land rights are among the challenges faced by those who escaped from or were released by the LRA.
For two decades from the mid-1980s, between 10,000 and 15,000 girls and women were abducted from their homes in northern Uganda to serve as fighters, porters and sex slaves of LRA commanders. These forced unions resulted in a population group often neglected by post-war recovery programmes: children born of war.

According to a recent article published by the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) “Thousands of such children exist on the margins, fathered through sexual violence by not only the LRA, but also government forces and a multitude of other state and non-state armed actors.”

A new report by the Justice and Reconciliation Project, based in the northern town of Gulu, points out that scores more women were subjected to sexual violence and exploitations in the so-called “protected villages” where most of the population of northern Uganda were forced to live during the war.
“As if the original violations were not severe enough, female victims are especially susceptible to ongoing forms of re-victimisation that extend long after initial violations occur,” says the report, titled, “Alone Like a Tree: Reintegration Challenges Facing Children Born of War [CBW] and Their Mothers in Northern Uganda.” 

The consequences for the women of protracted stigmatisation can include depression and other forms of mental illness as well as increased vulnerability to future abuse and violence due to economic marginalisation. Women interviewed by the report’s authors said their new partners often “do not want to pay their [children’s] school fees, and the step-parents are reportedly a major source of insults against CBW. They are continuously ostracised and isolated in some homes.” Interviewees also reported many cases of sexual abuse of both female and male CBW by stepfathers and other relatives. Reporting such abuse was very difficult, especially when the perpetrators were members of the armed forces.
“In the new relationships, the slightest disagreement between husband and wife gets blamed on the women’s past. Even when the man is also formerly-abducted, he can stigmatize the woman, accusing her of sleeping with many men from the bush as a means of justifying his abuse,” says the report.
One 17-year-old boy born in LRA captivity told the researchers: “We are sometimes told the home we are staying in is not our home, and the person taking care of us is not our father. That we should go and look for our father. This is always said by other children in that home. This makes our lives miserable.”

According to Jackson Odong of the National Memory and Documentation Centre in the northern Ugandan town of Kitgum, the needs of such populations have been neglected.
“Children born in captivity and their mothers continue to suffer because while they were encouraged to return, there was limited support for their reintegration. Focus was largely on ex-combatants. There have been little or no specific interventions targeting surviving children and mothers,” he said.
Irene Ikomu, a human rights lawyer and the coordinator of Parliament Watch Uganda, told IRIN that the report highlighted the need to evaluate current reintegration processes in northern Uganda. “There are clearly gaps that are yet to be addressed and this explains the continued challenges despite peace,” she said.
“Successful reintegration is not just about short-term concerns and political stability, but should especially focus on the long-term strategies for economic reconstruction and development,” added Ikomu. “In northern Uganda, we cannot say we have fully addressed reintegration without dealing with the issue of land access for the former combatants and victims, especially with regard to CBW,” she said.
The chairman of Uganda’s Amnesty Commission, Peter Onega, shared this view.
“It’s a serious issue. If not addressed urgently, it’s recipe for violence and conflict. As a commission, we haven’t done proper reintegration of these people because we are incapacitated. We don’t have the resources due to low government funding,” he told IRIN, explaining that only around US$1.5 million of the $2.5 million budgeted for reintegration programmes annually had been forthcoming.
“We need to carry out community sensitization, dialogues and reconciliation meetings to create an atmosphere for the community members to fully accept and live peacefully with these children and women,” he added.

Photo: Claire Kahunde/IRIN

The children born of war and their mothers performing Acholi traditional dance in Atiak sub county, Amuru district

The ICTJ article noted that while rebels who surrendered “were awarded reinsertion packages of basic household items by the government, there were no additional allowances for those with children born in captivity. This trend continues today, with many governmental and non-governmental programmes recognizing formerly-abducted persons as a special category for assistance, but not children born of war.”

Even within this category, different groups have different needs, the article explained. “For instance, female and male children will face different challenges in societies in which females’ families receive dowry when their daughter marries while males are expected to inherit land and other resources when they come of age. In northern Uganda, some families and clans have rejected male children born of war to a higher extent than females because they do not want to allocate land to them on which to settle when they come of age.”
In March 2014, the Women’s Advocacy Network, a coalition of NGOs, petitioned parliament to set up a gender-sensitive reparations fund to provide free health services to women and children affected by the insurgency, and a mechanism to “identify, integrate, and regularize stateless children born in captivity.” The network also called on the government to “identify, integrate, and resettle child victims of formerly-abducted women whose clan/cultural belongings are unknown.”
Nothing came of the petition.

from here

World Bank Group: Project Critics Threatened, Harassed, Jailed

(Washington, DC, June 22, 2015)

The World Bank Group has done little to prevent or dissuade governments from intimidating critics of the projects it funds, or monitor for reprisals, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. The 144-page report, “At Your Own Risk:Reprisals against Critics of World Bank Group Projects,” details how governments and powerful companies have threatened, intimidated, and misused criminal laws against outspoken community members who stand to be displaced or otherwise allegedly harmed by projects financed by the World Bank and its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The World Bank and IFC have failed to take adequate steps to help create a safe environment in which people can express concern or criticism about projects funded by the Bank Group without risk of reprisal, Human Rights Watch found. “The World Bank has long said that public participation and accountability are key to the success of the development efforts it funds,” said Jessica Evans, senior international financial institutions advocate at Human Rights Watch. “But the World Bank’s repeated failure to confront intimidation or harassment of people who criticize its projects risks making a mockery out of these principles.”

Human Rights Watch found that people who have publicly criticized projects financed by the World Bank and IFC have faced threats, harassment, and trumped-up criminal charges. When reprisals have occurred the Bank Group has largely left victims to their fate, preferring silence or “quiet diplomacy” over the kind of prompt, public, and vigorous responses that could make a real difference.

In spite of what are often grave risks, affected community members in numerous countries have spoken out about the problems that they see with Bank-supported projects.

Here we will focus on Uganda.

In Uganda, staff at Uganda Land Alliance and a journalist who worked to document and stop forced evictions linked to an IFC project described threats, including death threats. The government also demanded a public apology to the president and threatened to deregister Uganda Land Alliance unless they withdrew their report documenting the evictions. In recent years, a growing number of governments have embarked on broad and sometimes brutal campaigns to shut down the space for independent groups. Some governments have responded with ire to criticisms of government-supported development projects, condemning those who speak out as “anti-development” or traitors to the national interests. These abusive measures can obstruct people from participating in decisions about development, from publicly opposing development initiatives that may harm their livelihoods or violate their rights, and from complaining about development initiatives that are ineffective, harmful, or have otherwise gone wrong.

The independent, internal complaint mechanisms for the World Bank – the Inspection Panel – and the IFC – the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO) – have acknowledged the real risk of retaliation against critics, but neither has established systematic practices to identify risks of reprisals or address them. Since receiving the Human Rights Watch findings, the Inspection Panel has announced it is working on a guidance note on how to respond to reports of reprisals, and the CAO has promised to consider the Human Rights Watch recommendations. “The Inspection Panel and Compliance Advisor Ombudsman’s eagerness to tackle the risk of reprisals and improve their systems is a great sign,” Evans said. “World Bank management should follow the lead of its complaint mechanisms and take the issue of reprisals seriously.”

selected quotes:

    “There is still the stigma. We don’t go out as strong any more. We are very cautious about what we say. We don’t say anything controversial in a meeting any more. It affects how we do our things.”
    – A staff member of the Uganda Land Alliance, an independent group whose employees faced threats and harassment and that faced de-registration following its research and outspoken criticism of an IFC-financed project.

    “Those who delay industrial projects are enemies and I don’t want them. I am going to open war on them.”
    – Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda, two days after breaking ground on the World Bank-financed Bujagali dam project. Human Rights Watch found that reprisals take place in a broader climate that demonizes critics as “anti-development.”

    “Free speech is the cornerstone of transparency and accountability. Where World Bank projects are being implemented, citizens must have a voice.… The World Bank should have done more to protect the security of people speaking out against this project. It’s us who facilitate the voice of the people. I’m not aware of them [the World Bank] doing anything [about the reprisals against critics of this project].… This makes me believe they think free speech is not an issue for them.”
    – Geoffrey Wokulira Ssebaggala, a human rights defender and journalist who covered forced evictions in Uganda linked to an IFC-financed project.

Taken from here

Hunger persists

According to the 2015 report on the State of Food Insecurityin the World released Friday by Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, hunger remains an every-day challenge for 10m Ugandans. 

The experts argue that this figure of under-fed or malnourished people indicates that the country has scored dismally on the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) one—eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

For instance, the report shows that the prevalence of undernourishment in Uganda has been increasing from 4.2m in 1990 to 10.3m in 2015 up from 8.7m people in 2010.

“Eastern Africa remains the subregion with the biggest hunger problem in absolute terms, being home to 124 million undernourished people,” the report states.

In east Africa, Tanzania has the worst undernourishment figures (16.8m), while Kenya comes third (9.9m) and Rwanda register a minimal 3.9m people, who are under-fed. Uganda is second.

Increasing Numbers of Homeless and Landless

There is a “I can give you an example of the Chisumbanje ethanol fuel project here in Chipinge. The project resulted in thousands of villagers being displaced to pave way for a sugar plantation so that thousands of hectares of land space could be created for the ethanol-producing project, consequently displacing poor villagers,” Dliwayo told IPS. The 40,000 hectare sugar cane plantation which started in 2008 left more than 1,754 households displaced, according to PYD.
Fifteen years ago, Zimbabwe embarked on a controversial land reform programme to address colonial land-ownership imbalances, but activists have dismissed the move as disastrous for this Southern African nation. “To say African nations like Zimbabwe addressed the land problem is untrue because land which African governments like Zimbabwe grabbed from white farmers was parcelled out to political elites at the expense of hordes of peasants here,” Terry Mutsvanga, an award-winning Zimbabwean rights activist, told IPS. “Land grabs in Africa have helped to perpetuate economic inequalities similar to the colonial era economic imbalances,” he added. In 2010, ZimOnline, a Zimbabwean news service, reported that about 2,200 well-connected black Zimbabwean elites controlled nearly 40 percent of the 14 million hectares of land seized from white farmers, with each farm ranging in size from 250 to 4,000 hectares, with Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his family said to own 14 farms spanning at least 16,000 hectares.
 
Further up in East Africa, according to a 2011 presentation by Uganda’s Joshua Zake titled ‘Land Grabbing; silent pain for smallholder farmers in Uganda’, key characters of land grabbing in that country are also a few wealthy or powerful individuals against many vulnerable individuals or communities. Zake is Senior Programme Officer Environment and Natural Resources and Coordinator of the Uganda Forestry Working Group at Environmental Alert. According to Zake, land grabbing in Africa, particularly in Uganda, is promoted by the suspected presence of oil and other mineral resources beneath the land, such as in Uganda’s Amuru and Bulisa districts. Zake’s remarks fit well with Zimbabwe’s situation, where more than 800 families were displaced by government from Chiadzwa in Manicaland Province after the discovery of diamonds there in 2005.
 
But land grabs in Africa may also be rampant in towns and cities, according to private land developers here. “There is high demand of land for the construction of homes in towns and cities across Africa owing to the sharp rural-to-urban migration,” Etuna Nujoma, a private land developer based in Windhoek, the Namibian capital, told IPS. “The wealthy and the powerful as well as the corrupt politicians are taking advantage of the land demand and therefore often parcelling out urban land amongst themselves for resale at exorbitant prices at the expense of the poor.” Last year, irked by corrupt local authorities appearing to be dishing out land among themselves for resale, a group of informal settlement dwellers outside Namibia’s coastal holiday town of Swakopmund occupied municipal land with the intention of settling there.
 
With land grabs at their peak in Zimbabwe, members of the ruling Zanu-PF party are measuring out land pieces which they then give to people who pay in the range of 10 to 20 dollars for 30 to 50 square metres, depending on the areas in which they want to obtain housing stands, according to Andrew Nyanyadzi of Zanu-PF. “We don’t need permission from local authorities for us to have access to the land which our liberation war leaders fought for. It’s our land and we are therefore selling at affordable prices to ruling party loyalists,” Nyanyadzi told IPS.new scramble for Africa, with ordinary people facing displacement by the affluent and the powerful as huge tracts of land on the continent are grabbed by a minority, rights activists here say.
“Our forefathers cried foul during colonialism when their land was grabbed by colonialists more than a century ago, but today history repeats itself, with our own political leaders and wealthy countrymen looting land,” Claris Madhuku, director of the Platform for Youth Development (PYD), a democracy lobby group in Zimbabwe, told IPS.
 
Civil society activist Owen Dliwayo, who is programme officer for the Youth Dialogue Action Network, another lobby group here, said multinational companies were to blame in most African countries for land seizures. Consequently, lobby groups in Zimbabwe say havoc rules supreme in the country’s towns and cities. “In Harare, land belonging to the city has been taken over by known militant groups of people with links to Zanu-PF, whom police here are even afraid to apprehend,” Precious Shumba, the director of Harare Residents Trust, told IPS. “This is exactly what happened to Harare’s urban land in Hatcliff high density area, where housing cooperatives belonging to the ruling Zanu-PF leaders have grabbed council land using their political power,” Shumba said. However, like other countries across Africa, Zimbabwe’s local authority by-laws prohibit individuals or organisations from selling land that does not legally belong to them.
 
Meanwhile, in Mozambique, the poor are losing out to foreign investors on land rights there despite the state being the sole owner of land. Under the country’s constitution, there is no private land ownership – land and its associated resources are the property of the state – although the country’s Land Law grants private persons the right to use and benefit from the land whether or not they have a formal title. However, loopholes have emerged in the law. A survey last year by Mozambique’s National Farmers’ Union showed that there was a colonial-era style land grab there, with politically-connected companies in the former Portuguese colony seizing hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland from peasants.
According to GRAIN, a non-profit organisation supporting small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, peasants in northern Mozambique have difficulties keeping their lands as foreign companies set up large-scale agribusinesses there. The NGO says Mozambicans are being told that these projects will bring them benefits, but this is not how Caesar Guebuza and other Mozambican peasants see it. “Agricultural investments by foreign companies have not benefitted us, but rather we have lost land to these companies investing here and we are being treated as aliens in our own land,” Guebuza told IPS.
Economists blame the Mozambican government for favouring foreign investors, who now possess large swathes of state land. “The Mozambican government is known for siding with foreign investors who now occupy huge tracts of land for their own use as local peasants lose out on land, which is their birth right,” Kingston Nyakurukwa, a Zimbabwean independent economist, told IPS.
 
With foreign investors acquiring huge tracts of land ahead of locals in Africa, ActionAid Tanzania earlier this year said that through the European Union, United States and several European countries, the European Union’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition plans to invest 7.57 billion euros in agricultural development and food security across Africa. However, said Nyakurukwa, these will be business ventures that will strip Africans of their hard-earned money as they buy agricultural produce.
 
Similarly, in Nigeria, Mozambique and Tanzania, smallholder farmers are being moved off their land, paving the way for sugarcane, rice and other export crop-growing projects backed by New Alliance money, according to ActionAid Tanzania’s findings.
For Africans in Tanzania, big money might be gradually rendering them landless.
“Money from investors seem to be elbowing us out of our native lands here in Tanzania as no one has been offered the choice of whether to be resettled or not as we are being forcibly offered money or land for resettlement,” Moses Malunguja, a disgruntled peasant from Tanzania, told IPS.

from here

The Darker Side Of Green - Carbon Violence In Uganda

Oakland, CA: New research uncovers the “darker side” of the global green economy, revealing brutal consequences of much-lauded carbon offset schemes.

A new report released today by the Oakland Institute, The Darker Side of Green: Plantation Forestry and Carbon Violence in Uganda, debunks popular claims that carbon trading represents a “win-win” for rural communities and the environment. Firsthand accounts from Uganda reveal that villagers living in and around land concessions acquired by Green Resources, a Norwegian company implementing forestry-based carbon offset projects, have experienced forced evictions and restricted access to land and food, in addition to loss of livelihood—all in the name of green investment. Green Resources, allegedly the largest operator of green forestry plantations on the African continent, has leased more than 10,000 hectares of land in Uganda alone, with additional landholdings in Mozambique and Tanzania.

Supported by investments and loans from international aid and investment development agencies—including NORFUND, the Norwegian Investment Fund for Developing Countries—the stated objective of Green Resources is to mitigate climate change and ensure sustainable environmental management, community development, and poverty alleviation in Uganda.

“Based on research conducted over the last two years, the report raises important questions and concerns about the ability of the project to achieve its stated goals,” said Dr. Kristen Lyons, lead author of the report. “Interviews with over 150 Ugandan villagers shed light on the ‘darker side’ of the green economy and expose the hidden social and environmental costs of Green Resources projects in Uganda that are borne by the local communities,” she continued.

"While carbon trading based on the offset of environmental pollution from the global north to the global south is widely championed as a good news story, this report highlights the need for closer scrutiny of such initiatives,” said Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland Institute, publisher of the report. “It is unacceptable for carbon trading schemes to result in forced evictions and increased food insecurity while delivering little to no improvement on access to health, sanitation, and education," he continued.

read the report here

FAQ on carbon violence here

Uganda's Demographic Time-Bomb

Ugandan politicians are playing a dangerous game with the country’s legions of unemployed youth. Instead of tackling the problem, leaders on both sides of the political equation are exploiting jobless youngsters for their own ends. In doing so they risk sending the east African nation into a spiral of political and social upheaval.

 

Uganda has the world’s youngest population, with 78% of its 34m citizens below the age of 30, according to a 2011 report by the International Youth Foundation, an international charity based in Baltimore. 

 

It also has one of sub-Saharan Africa’s highest rates of youth unemployment, according to a 2012 study by ActionAid International Uganda (AAIU), an NGO. The study sampled both rural and urban youth and found that 61.6% of Uganda’s youths (those between 12 and 30 and not enrolled in primary, secondary or tertiary education) were jobless.

 

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) puts the figure far lower, at 7.3%, but the ILO’s definition of youth unemployment is “unrealistic”, according to AAIU project co-ordinator Rebecca Kukundakwe. The ILO’s definition excludes anyone who has worked for “even one hour in any economic activity…during a specified recent period (usually the past four weeks)”, according to the ILO website. “Our perspective is that if someone is not in continuous and meaningful employment, he or she is not employed, especially when it comes to the youth,” Ms Kukundakwe said.

 

Like most sub-Saharan African countries, Uganda has enjoyed healthy economic growth. Its GDP, fuelled by copious flows of foreign direct investment and a boom in the retail and construction sectors, has grown by about 5% per year over the last decade, according to the World Bank. But this progress has still not been fast enough to create the economic opportunities needed to absorb the large pool of young people joining the labour force every year. Uganda’s 3.2% annual population growth is one of the world’s highest, according to a 2013 report by Uganda’s official population policy department. 

 

“Youth unemployment in Uganda is a time bomb,” Ms Kukundakwe told Africa in Fact. “We have a category of young people who are energetic [and] mobile, but who are not being utilised. Like the saying goes, ‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.’”

 

Ms Kukundakwe pointed specifically to an “ominous” development: the growing tendency of politicians—both in government and among the opposition—to use unemployed youths to advance their own agendas. Politicians pay cheap bribes to idle youths to stage violent demonstrations, she said.

 

“There’s patronage. We have a lot of young people who are not concerned about their own country but are only interested in how much they can get from politics, and politicians are exploiting this.” 

 

Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, in power since 1986, faces growing opposition as failed government policies and runaway corruption fuel popular anger.   Uganda’s poor urban youth, in particular, are enraged by politicians who they see as privileged and self-serving, and whose affluence has come at their expense.  

 

The majority of Uganda’s jobless youths live in cities and towns, according to Ms Kukundakwe. It is in these urban centres that political violence has flared repeatedly since the 2011 presidential elections. 

 

In the wake of those elections, a wave of civil unrest swept the capital Kampala, the capital, and several other large towns, including Jinja and Mbale in the east, as well as Mbarara and Kabale in the south-west, championed by Kizza Besigye, then the leader of the country’s largest opposition party, Forum for Democratic Change.

 

Stone-throwing young mobs took centre stage in these riots. The government responded with a deadly crackdown that left at least nine dead and scores wounded, according to a 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group.

 

Although government action stemmed the unrest, violent confrontations between opposition youth and security forces have since become routine events in major towns. Markets and public bus terminals in downtown Kampala, crowded with idle youngsters, attract opposition politicians eager to rouse popular anger against the government. Images of the resulting violent clashes have become regular features on the country’s news pages. 

 

Last January 9th and March 6th, youngsters gathered in downtown Kampala to hear Mr Besigye and four MPs expelled last year from the ruling National Resistance Movement. Police used teargas and rubber bullets to disperse the youthful crowd.

 

President Museveni’s government has long admitted that Uganda’s high youth unemployment is a problem, but has done little to combat it. However some officials in his government, unnerved by the recent spate of youth-led clashes, are starting to propose solutions.

 

Pius Bigirimana, the permanent secretary in the gender, labour and social development ministry and whose portfolio is responsible for youth welfare, oversees a $106m programme launched last January, which hopes to provide job-training skills or start-up capital to 1.4m people under 30.  

 

Critics of the project, however, question the government’s intentions. Gerald Karuhanga, an independent MP, claims this programme is a politically expedient way to win youth loyalty ahead of the 2016 elections. 

 

“The timing, and the way it’s being implemented, already shows the intention has more to do with political mobilisation than [a desire] to create employment and eliminate poverty among the youth,” he said.

 

Mr Karuhanga is concerned that Mr Museveni’s government intends to hand out the money directly to young people—as it has done before, with predictably dismal results. The government launched a programme in the late 1990s called Entadikwa (Luganda for “seed capital”), which provided young people with small, unsecured loans, ostensibly to help them start small businesses. 

 

The programme failed, however, as Mr Bigirimana admitted to Africa in Fact. Recipients used many of these handouts to buy alcohol and pay bride price, according to news reports. A similar programme, dubbed Bonabagagawale (Luganda for “prosperity for all”) was rolled out in early 2000s and suffered the same fate. 

 

When the government hands out the money directly, it creates the sense that these are simply contributions made in return for political support, Mr Karuhanga said. 

 

Instead, the money should be transferred to microfinance institutions, which could vet potential beneficiaries and provide and collect the loans, he argued. Uganda has a healthy network of more than 100 separate credit providers that could support such a scheme, according to the finance ministry.

 

Mr Bigirimana has also proposed a more radical measure to reduce youth unemployment: limit the number of children a woman is legally allowed to bear.

 

Uganda has the world’s seventh-highest fertility rate, with an average of 6.2 children per woman, according to 2013 figures from the United States-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Uganda is poised to see its population of 34m leap to 55.4m by 2025 and 113.9m by mid-century, according to PRB projections.

 

“We should come up with a policy that limits the number of children someone should produce to four,” Mr Bigirimana said. “If you produce five, you should go to jail.”

 

His suggestion, however, might find stiff resistance from his own government. President Museveni has argued that Uganda’s high population growth is not a problem. Instead, the solution is to expand the industrial and services sectors. 

 

“The problem is not population per se,” Mr Museveni told a July 2012 summit on family planning in London. “Africa, or in this particular case Uganda, needs to metamorphose from a pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal society to a middle-class, skilled working-class society. That social metamorphosis will inevitably bring down the population growth.”

 

There is some truth in Mr Museveni’s stance, argued Deepali Khanna, director of youth learning at the MasterCard Foundation, the Toronto-based philanthropic arm of the payments services company. High population growth rates are partly responsible for soaring unemployment among Ugandan and African youth, she said. But insufficient economic growth, small formal labour markets, and insufficient experience and skills also play a role.

 

Ms Khanna also blames “skills mismatches” in the Ugandan economy—when job seekers do not have the skills demanded by the labour market—and low economic activity in the countryside.

 

“In rural areas, young people largely work in the agriculture sector, where the lack of agricultural productivity, enterprise opportunities, financial services and stable work inhibits their ability to move out of poverty,” she added.

 

Youth unemployment in Uganda is rooted in demographic growth and economic breakdown. It will require more than politically expedient solutions. As long as cynical politicians use jobless youth to further their own ambitions, instead of searching for a solution, the situation will only get worse.

 

from here

See here for more on youth unemployment and imminent problems in Algeria

 

 

 

Private or Public: Vigilant Civil Oversight Necessary

Despite large aid support, Ghana's privatised water utitily AVRL consistently failed to meet its contractual commitments.  Water is now back in state hands,  but it will need increased investment and a vigilant civil society to deliver the services Ghanaians need.

Ghana finally yielded to pressure from multilateral donors in 2006 and privatised its urban water utilities. The Government’s experiment with what it conveniently referred to as “private sector participation”, and not privatisation, was short-lived. This was despite considerable high hopes and expectations fostered by the Ghanaian media as well as very well-resourced backers and promoters of privatisation. The road between 2006 and 2011 was bumpy for the new management. The period after 2011, after water returned to the public sector, has also not been smooth. However it has highlighted the cost and key challenges that confront a public/state facilitator and provider of urban water within the context and constraints of a developing country.

Before Privatisation
The economic context before privatisation in Ghana was similar to most African countries in the 1980s and 1990s. These economies were characterised by high trade deficits due to a decline in prices of exports and a surge in the prices of imports, with resulting high budget deficits. This made it impossible for such countries to provide needed support to vital state-owned enterprises, and there was a consequential decline in the efficiency of such enterprises.
Particularly in Ghana, there was pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for fiscal discipline. The intention was to keep the government from investing in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and supporting them to weather the economic storms of the time. The prescription was to rather leave such roles for the private sector. Whether such private sector actors existed in Ghana at the time and were willing to take the risk were issues that did not receive much attention. This did not prevent a vigorous push by donors requiring the government to privatise, for example, the urban water and energy sectors^[1] in exchange for economic assistance
This pressure led Ghana to open up its urban water sector to private ‘capital’ in 2006. The government’s original offer of a lease concession was not successful with previously interested bidders saying a lease involved too high risk in relation to political stability in West Africa and the large liabilities of the Ghana Water and Sewage Corporation among others.^[2]
The truth was, however, that they had wanted to pay very little. Their concern about stability was not so much about stability of West Africa, but more about the wider stability and sustainability of water privatization contracts globally. On the continent and elsewhere in Latin America, similar contracts had been overthrown and were a major cause of uneasiness for the bidders for the Ghana contract.^[3]
As a result private sector actors sought an arrangement that could allow the private sector to participate in urban water supply in Ghana without being required to make any direct investment.^[4] The Government therefore contracted Aqua Vitens Rand Limited (AVRL), a company formed by Vitens Evides International of the Netherlands and Rand Water of South Africa. The company was paid USD 5 million as management fees for five years. Additionally, they administered donor support to the contract of USD 120 million for non-infrastructural work with huge cost overruns.

 New water provision failed to meet expectations
A close study of the contract shows how much it privileged AVRL above the state.  The contract was clear about the obligations of the Ghana Water Company Limited and very general about the obligations of AVRL.^[5] The road became bumpy for AVRL because of the contradictions in the contract, particularly the arrangement where the private actor invested nothing financially and was given guaranteed returns before any performance.
The effect of this was that shortly after the signing of the contract, AVRL had to contend with the high expectations of workers seconded to it, as well as expectations of citizens who had been told of the efficiencies of AVRL. With no new investments by the new actors, AVRL faced similar challenges to those that the Ghana Water Company Limited faced: poor conditions of work for workers and irregular water availability for most citizens.
In the end, AVRL failed consistently throughout the contract period to meet its targets. Some of the significant failures included inability to reduce non-revenue water^[6], inability to improve water quality, and consistently poor performance in six other target areas identified in a World Bank commissioned technical audit report.^[7] These facts, in addition to the unmet expectations of citizens and workers of the company, created the conditions for the contract to be discontinued.

Reverting to public management
The same media that was instrumental in getting the public to accept AVRL became the ally of citizens and the workers in forcing them out. In June 2011, the management contract with AVRL was discontinued. However, operations did not return directly to the Ghana Water Company Limited as expected, but passed to an interim structure that the government named the Ghana Urban Water Company Limited. Some activists believed the World Bank (opposed to discontinuation despite the evidence) influenced this process. There was therefore a deadlock situation for about two years, after which pressure from civil society ensured a full reversion to the public company, Ghana Water Company Limited.
Currently, the urban water sector is fully owned by the state and is managed centrally by the Ghana Water Company Limited through its regional and district offices. It retains both production and distribution functions.

Ghana Water Company Limited’s Performance
Unfortunately the improved performance expected by citizens has not yet materialized and signs of poor water supply are everywhere and increasing. Water is still fetched and stored in yellow 25 litre gallon containers in most communities.
One cannot blame the Ghana Water Company Limited entirely for the present difficulties. The five years of dormancy in which they were placed during the management contract was enough to affect their momentum and rob them of continuity from their past experience.
Another publicly run water utility, the Uganda Water and Sewerage Corporation, offers a useful point of comparison. It was spared this hiatus and had reforms that did not bring in new managers but rather corrected what was wrong within the public corporation. The Uganda Water and Sewage Corporation is today celebrated as a successful case. It even now offers assistance to other countries, like Ghana, learning from the challenges it had.
At the Global Water Operators Partnership conference of 2013 in Barcelona, the UN-Habitat facilitated the second phase of a mentoring partnership between the Ghana Water Company Limited and the Uganda Water and Sewage Corporation under a public-public partnership (PuPs). Under the arrangement, the Ugandan Water Corporation acts as a mentor for the Ghana Water Company Limited.

Influence of Uganda – The promise and dangers of PuPs
Uganda’s experience, was one in which the water utility was highly corporatised. This process has been prone to sacrifice access for efficiency. A case in point is the introduction in Uganda of prepaid water metres to increase revenue collection efficiency. Under the public-public mentorship by Uganda, the Ghana Water Company Limited announced a similar policy in February 2014.^[8] Intense public reaction and revulsion caused the policy to be halted, though not abandoned. Meanwhile, public investments into expanding infrastructure has improved relatively. Such investments mean that the capital city Accra’s current capacity of 93 million gallons^[9] a day will increase to 158.3 million gallons by the end of 2014. This will provide 8.3 million gallons in excess of current demand.^[10]
Though the increase in capacity would improve access, the Ghana Water Company Limited is looking for ways to avoid using public (tax) finance to fund its operations. This makes citizens the sole source of cost recovery, with poor areas and people being the most vulnerable. This was behind attempts to introduce the pre-paid water metering in  Ghana.
What the Ghana-Uganda partnership shows is that in the absence of a vigilant civil society, even a state company will sacrifice the common social objectives for profit objectives. Civil society therefore has an obligation to expose this discriminatory public policy and to mobilise public support behind the social objectives that should equally inform water supply to make safe water available for both rich and poor.

from here with links

Uganda and Israeli Racism

 A century ago, Theodor Herzl - the father of modern political Zionism - proposed Uganda as a temporary refuge for persecuted Jews. Uganda is now on the receiving end of other persecuted peoples, this time African refugees who have sought asylum in Israel only to be imprisoned in detention facilities and then returned to the Africa.

 The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in a February 2014 article titled "Israel secretly flying asylum seekers to Uganda", harsh conditions in the detention centres plus nominal financial compensation have facilitated the deportation of many migrants under the guise of "voluntary departure". Uganda's denial of the existence of any deportation agreement with Israel renders accountability for human life even less of an option

The Israeli director of the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants on this non-solution to refugee plight: "It is known that Uganda deports asylum seekers to their countries of origin." The organisation also said that " 'voluntary departure' is the result of heavy and illegal psychological pressure on detained, isolated and desperate asylum seekers, which more than once has included threats and lies....the position of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees is that people cannot be considered to be acting of their own free will if the choice they have is between detention and being sent back to their country".

One  reason for the disingenuous rendering of a "voluntary" exodus of refugees is, of course, to prevent an already precarious demographic balance in Israel from tipping in favour of non-Jewish non-whites. There has been political incitement to anti-African violence and the forcible injection of Ethiopian women with contraceptives.  The Israeli regime insists on referring to African asylum seekers as "infiltrators", which connotes criminality and facilitates the illusion of a steady stream of enemies that must be combated. Between November 2012 and May 2013 the Jewish state had approved only one asylum application from a population of approximately 60,000 non-Jewish African asylum seekers in Israel. The applicant happened to be an albino.

"When Israel rounds up and deports African refugees, it makes a mockery of the millions of Jews who died during World War II because no one would grant them shelter,"  Israeli-Canadian journalist David Sheen noted.

Apparently so indistinguishable from one another in their blackness that they can be repatriated to any old place in Africa.

 What does Uganda stand to gain from participating in outsourced inhumanity? A 2013 Vice magazine report details the perks of the arrangement: Weapons discounts and military training for African countries willing to take on Israel's dirty work.  Uganda's interest in Israeli weapons is perhaps less than surprising given the behaviour of its own army and security forces, often characterised by torture and other human rights violations. In 2003, Haaretz ran a story on Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's visit to Israel for the purpose of "arms shopping", an excursion that was said to have been "arranged by an arms merchant, Amos Golan of the Silver Shadow company, who represents IAI [Israel Aircraft Industries] and other Israeli defence industries in Uganda".

 A Vice magazine article notes that, as of September of last year, approximately 40,000 of the African "infiltrators" were from Eritrea, "a country with one of the worst human rights records on Earth". The author goes on to comment, with well-directed sarcasm, that "these people aren't coming to Israel because they fancy upping their matzah intake or living on Palestinian land illegally; they're genuinely trying to escape persecution and find a way to survive".

From Al Jazeera