Emma Amaize, The Vanguard, 2 July 2008

MOVEMENT for Emancipation of the Niger-Delta (MEND) has confiscated the stool of a royal father in Bayelsa State alleged to be sponsoring sea bandits and also captured seven of the suspected sea pirates. The royal father himself bolted away. One of the captured sea pirates is the commander of the group, while the second one, identified as Kingsley is the manager.

Reports said the high command of the MEND was unhappy with the activities of the sea bandits who specialized in robbing fishing trawlers and other ocean-going vessels around the Pennington River in Bayelsa because of the credibility problem it had brought to the Niger-Delta struggle. The last attack of the sea pirates was on two fish trawlers, belonging to a Lagos-based company.

The seven suspected sea pirates were said to be in custody in one of the MEND camps in the Niger-Delta as at yesterday and four of them reportedly confessed that it was the royal father that is their godfather.

Commander of the Joint Task Force (JTF) on the Niger-Delta , Brigadier-General Nanven Rimtip confirmed when contacted that militants in the Niger-Delta clashed somewhere in Bayelsa State over some undisclosed matters and the leader of one of the groups was  allegedly “kidnapped” by the other group.

But a MEND commander who admitted that the suspected sea pirates were actually being held by the militant group said the royal father was on the run.

“Yes, we sent out our fighters to confront the sea pirates when we got information that the boys were robbing fishing trawlers, they attack them, extort money from them, sometimes, they disconnect trawlers and carry the whole thing away. You see, all these things they are doing is spoiling the struggle and people think that it is the MEND that is doing it.

“Our information is that a man who claims to be a royal father is the one that is bankrolling them and we went there to confront them after we got report of what was happening, that was after they just robbed a trawler, belonging to a company in Lagos.

“Some of the sea pirates had run away before we got there but we got some people, among the seven with us, four of them are believed to be involved in sea piracy but from the confessions, we think the other three are not deeply with them”, he said.

Vanguard learnt that some of the items that were stolen from the fishing trawler were found in the residence of the purported royal father and that was why his stool (seat) was carried away.
One of the senior operatives of the MEND who was privy to the action said: “Yes, we carried away his seat, he is not even a royal father, we know the authentic royal father of his area, but, he is going about deceiving people that he is one and denting the struggle”.

He said it was the monarch that sent the sea pirates that killed a naval officer, early this year, and the MEND was not happy with such activity.

“We are also aware that he used to send his boys to catch white people and they demand ransom”, he added.Asked when the MEND would hand over the detained sea pirates to security agents, since it had no power to hold them, he said, “We will deal with them in our way, they are fellow Niger-Deltans, but, we cannot handover them to the security agents because we don’t trust them and we don’t know what they will do with them thereafter”.

“In fact, how can you  suggest that we should hand them over to the security agents, we cannot do that, we just hope that after dealing with them, they will change and stop robbing people because the struggle is not to rob people.

We have reasons for blowing up pipelines in the Niger-Delta, it is not we are animals, but, the government has turned us to animals and slaves in our own country, we have been pushed to the walls and we are telling them enough is enough of the marginalization and oppression”, he explained.
He said they would be released in due course after the MEND would have finished with them and educated them on what the true struggle is all about.

Delhi Solidarity Group, 26 June 2008

More than 200 people join the protest march from Shaheed Park to Red Fort and hold a public meeting

New Delhi, June 26 2008 : Remembering the Black Day of June 25/26th 1975 when a State of Emergency was imposed by the Indira Gandhi Government suspending all civil liberties, curtailing freedom of press, powers of judiciary and incarcerating any opposition to her rule, today more than 200 people from various unauthorized colonies, informal sector workers, social workers, and others marched under the banner of NAPM, Delhi (National Alliance for Peoples Movement) and declared that the moment of siege has not ended and India is in a state of emergency. Apart from the prevailing repressive conditions elsewhere in the country, in Delhi, we are witness to demolitions of slums, increasing difficulties for common people, informalisation of labour, inflation, difficult living conditions and worst of all protests by victims of Bhopal on the streets entering now the fifth month along with an indefinite hunger strike for 15 days.

The meeting was attended by the activists of Rashtriya Kamgar Federation, Rashtriya Gharelu Kaamgar Sangathan, Jan Sangharsh Vahini, NAPM Delhi, Sangharsh, Lok Raj Sangathan, Delhi Solidarity Group, CACIM, Delhi Forum, INSAF, IDS and others.

Speaking at the public meeting at Red Fort Bhupinder Singh Rawat of Jan Sangharsh Vahini said, “Democracy in India is alive not because of the parliament and judiciary but because common struggling masses who in their quest for justice have time and again shown their faith in the democratic values best epitomized in the Constitution. In the troubled times when we are witnessing this siege, its upon us to work towards reclaiming our right to live in harmony, enjoy the freedoms, dissent and debate without fear and voice our protests at every nook and corner in the city. We stand opposed to the demolitions of unauthorized colonies, harassment of the urban working class poor and are committed to resisting the designs of the government and fighting for the rights of housing and other basic amenities for the urban poor.”

Madhuresh Kumar of NAPM Delhi explaining the today’s programme said, “the peoples movement are particularly concerned about the increasing legitimization of a skewed and distorted form of technocratic and capitalist development from all quarters of the State, which is further passed off as India – Shining, glowing, glittering by political manipulators and the media megaphones. More than ever we are living in a ‘police state’ today where human rights defenders, artists, and those fighting for the justice have to bear the brunt of state’s oppression. The laws like AFSPA, CSPSA, NSA etc. continue to harass and terrorise its own citizens all across India including J&K and North East.” He further added that quite unlike 1975, we are now in a real crisis-situation where the State has unleashed a kind of a war on the common people of this land, be they farmers, fisherpeople, factory workers, Adivasis, Dalits or women. That is borne out by untold violence and atrocities perpetrated on the people of Nandigram, Nandagudi, Kalinganagar, Raigadh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, slums of Mumbai, Delhi and other cities, the farmers’ suicides, displacement and dispossession of traditional communities across the country.”

Rajendra Ravi a national convener of NAPM explained that in such a scenario the citizen-announced ‘Emergency’ calls for the following code of conduct to be followed (measures that would be reverse of a Government-announced Emergency):

1) Rather than a draconian censorship the Press is called upon to disseminate the truth, facts that sensitively portray the toiling people’s struggle for survival against the State-corporate nexus and its machinations to privatise all natural resources and public properties.

2) The State rather than being given sweeping powers, its right to acquire land in the name of ‘public purpose’ for SEZs, for destructive industrial and other ‘development’ projects etc. will be abrogated.

3) If Courts abdicate their responsibility of protecting peoples’ rights, all issues of public interest will be decided in ‘Janata Adalats’.

4) The only real ‘opposition’ to the State-corporate-bureaucracy nexus is not from opposition political parties but from affected people, victims, concerned and aware citizens. The hypocrisy of the all mainstream political parties whether in power or opposition, stands exposed in this ’state of emergency’. People would do well to realise that all parties, of whatever hue, are hand-in-glove with each other.

5) People will have to watch out against the twin threats of Communalism and New Economic Policy, declaring NO to the new treaty with the WTO.

6) Declaring people’s rule, ‘Lok Raj’, we would begin in small to large ways, to assert our rights to resources to planning towards fulfillment of basic needs.

7) More sustainable ways of harnessing and utilizing our natural and human capital would be facilitated and expropriative global to national powers be challenged.

8 ) People and people’s politics will take over, step by step, the Statist and fascist controls of powers-to-be, to bring in a revolutionary change towards a humane society.

Madhuresh : 9818905316 Rajendra Ravi : 9868200316

For National Alliance of Peoples Movement, Sangharsh and others

Date: 26th June 2008

Sanhati, 27 June 2008

by Richard Pithouse, Durban. 16 June 2008

The battle for land in Harry Gwala settlement

The industrial and mining towns on the Eastern outskirts of Johannesburg are unlovely places. They’re set on flat windswept plains amidst the dumps of sterile sand left over from old mines. In winter the wind bites, the sky is a very pale blue and it seems to be all coal braziers, starved dogs, faded strip malls, gun shops and rusting factories and mine headgear. All that seems new are the police cars and, round the corner from the Harry Gwala shack settlement, a double story facebrick strip club.

But even here the battle for land continues. The poor are loosing their grip on the scattered bits of land which they took in defiance of apartheid more than twenty years ago. The state is, again, sending in bulldozers and men with guns to move the poor from central shack settlements to peripheral townships. In every relocation many are simply left homeless. It is very difficult to resist the armed force of the state but people do what they can. Officials are often stoned. In principle the courts should provide relief from evictions that are not just illegal but are in fact criminal acts under South African law. There have been notable successes but it is often difficult to get pro bono legal support, legal processes are slow and the evictions continue.

In the Harry Gwala settlement the poorest women are on their hands and knees searching for bits of coal to bake into lumps of clay to keep the braziers burning. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in Durban and Ashraf Cassiem from the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town are here to meet with the Harry Gwala branch of the Landless People’s Movement. These are all poor people’s movements that have been criminalised and violently attacked by the state. The meeting is to discuss strategies for holding onto the urban land that keeps people close to work, schools, libraries and all the other benefits of city life. This is what it has come down to. Militancy is about holding onto what was taken from apartheid.

Here in Harry Gwala forced removals started in 2004. That was also the year in which the Landless People’s Movement declared a boycott of the local government elections and were subject to severe repression, including the police torture of some activists. In August of the following year 700 residents marched on the Mayor demanding an end to forced removals and the immediate provision of water, electricity and toilets. Provincial Housing Minister Nomvula Mokonyane declared that the evictions “marked another milestone for housing delivery” and explained that “We are doing all this because we are a caring government and want to give you back your dignity”. The Municipality’s website responded to the march by noting that “Although there was an initial reluctance on the part of the Harry Gwala residents to move, the metro and the [private housing] company met them to work through any objections and give them reasons why such a move would be worth their while.” But in May 2006, when the Municipality tried to move ahead with the forced removals in earnest, it became clear that residents were determined to hold their ground. The Johannesburg Star reported that “police fired rubber bullets and bulldozed their way into the Harry Gwala informal settlement near Wattville after residents barricaded themselves in with burning tyres. Shots rang out and people scattered in all directions as metro police fired at them. Twelve people were injured and were taken to hospitals in the area.”

In Harry Gwala the evictions are remembered as a war. Now the settlement is recovering from a different kind of eviction, a different kind of war. It is to this that the discussion soon turns.

The Pogroms of May, 2008

The Freedom Charter adopted in Johannesburg in 1955 as the manifesto of the struggle against apartheid declared that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it.” But for two terrible weeks in May people unable to pass mob tests for indigeneity were intimidated, beaten, hacked, raped and burnt out of shack settlements and city centres across South Africa. The attacks began in the shack settlements around Johannesburg. In Harry Gwala the homes of two Shangaan families, one whom had come from Maputo in Mozambique and the other from Giyani in South Africa, were burnt and demolished. All that is left is squares of burnt earth. The local Landless People’s movement moved swiftly to condemn the attacks and to work with the local police, with whom they have often been in conflict, to stop them from spreading further. In the nearby Makause settlement, which is not organised into an oppositional movement autonomous from the state, things were far worse. Here the settlement is dotted with burnt out and demolished buildings. There is also a terribly empty 200 metre long strip where, in February last year, 2 500 shacks were unlawfully demolished at gunpoint by the state and the residents forcibly moved to a ‘transit camp’ 40 kilometres out of town.

In the second week the pogrom spread to the city centre and there were clashes at the Central Methodist Church, a well known haven for undocumented Zimbabweans, where residents successfully barricaded themselves in with piles of bricks for defence. In January there had been a much more damaging attack on the church. On that occasion the attack came from the police. They stormed in with dogs, pepper spray and batons and arrested 500 people. The church told the media that people were assaulted and robbed in the attack and that even those with documents were arrested.

In the second week the pogroms also spread to Durban, Cape Town and the small towns in the hinterland. In Durban the first attack was on a down town Nigerian bar and was followed by attacks on Rwandese and Congolese people living in city flats and then attacks on Mozambicans, Zimbabweans and Malawians living in shack settlements. In Cape Town it began with the Somali shopkeepers, who have been murdered at an incredible rate for years. The state has dismissed the clearly targeted nature of the ongoing killing of Somalis as ‘just ordinary crime’.

Some of the mobs were singing Jacob Zuma’s campaign song, Bring My Machine Gun. Some came out of shack settlements and migrant worker hostels linked to Inkatha. Some were just drunk young men. The most widely reported tests used to determine indigenity, such as seeing if people know the formal and slightly archaic Zulu word for elbow, were taken straight from the tactics that the police have used for years. The mob definition of foreigner always centred on foreign born Africans but in some instances Pakistanis and South Africans of minority ethnicities, especially Shangaan, Venda and Tsonga people, were also targeted. There are a number of credible allegations of police complicity in the pogroms but in some places community organisations were able to work with local police stations to bring the violence under control. There are many accounts of individual acts of brave opposition to the attacks by both South Africans and migrants. In the Protea South shack settlement in Johannesburg migrants were able to successfully organise themselves into self-defence units and to protect themselves with round the clock patrols. It is striking that in many, although not all, of the areas under the control of militant organisations of the poor that have been in serious conflict with the state there were no attacks at all.

After two weeks 62 people were dead, a third of them South African citizens, and figures for the number of people displaced ranged from 80 000 to 100 000. Some had fled the country and others were sheltering in churches, at police stations and in refugee camps. Conditions in the camps are often grim. Human rights organisations have issued strenuous condemnations and there have already been threats of collective suicide, clashes with the police and demands for the United Nations to take over management of the camps from the South African state.

A Crisis in Citizenship

Thabo Mbeki’s Presidency was, in the spirit of Pan-Africanism, animated by a vision of an African Renaissance that would finally redeem the world historical promise of the Haitian Revolution. On the first day of 2004 he resisted considerable international pressure and stood with Jean Bertrand-Aristide in Port-au-Prince to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of that Revolution. Six months later Mbeki welcomed Aristide to Pretoria with an uncharacteristically warm hug on a red carpet. This followed Aristide’s kidnapping and removal to the Central African Republic by the American military on the last day of February. Aristide still lives in Pretoria.

Some saw these acts of solidarity as a concrete step towards Pan-African solidarity. Mbeki’s detractors on the left pointed to the voluntary adoption of a structural adjustment programme in 1996, or the decisive moves to bring popular politics under party control from 1990, to argue that he was merely Africanising domination. But others argued that he, in the spirit of realpolitik and mindful of the fate of Toussaint l’Ouverture, Bertrand Aristide and their revolutions, had made a tactical decision to use the wealth of South Africa to make his global battle against anti-African racism a bourgeois initiative secured by the technocratic management of the poor.

Most of the slaves that made the Haitian Revolution were born in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their revolution offered citizenship, black citizenship, to everyone who fought in it, including Polish and German mercenaries who deserted their posts to join it. Citizenship became a political question rather than a matter of indigeneity or ethnicity. But for those two weeks in May it wasn’t safe to be Congolese in many of the poor neighbourhoods in South African cities. There are still places where Aristide, whose excellent but French accented Zulu could easily mark him as Congolese or Rwandese, would be unwise to tread without security.

Contrary to much of the discussion in the media this state of affairs is not new. Indeed a month before the recent attacks 30 shacks were burnt and 100 people displaced from the Diepsloot settlement in Johannesburg. When the police eventually arrived their only response was to arrest twenty Zimbabweans for being undocumented. Migrants have been driven out of shack settlements in sporadic conflagrations since October 2001 when hundreds of Zimbabweans were hounded out of the Zandspruit settlement, also in Johannesburg. Three weeks before the attacks in Zandspruit the Department of Home Affairs had announced ‘Operation Clean Up’ in which people in the settlement were asked to support the Department in ‘rooting out illegal immigrants’. Between 600 and 700 people were rounded up and deported to Mozambique and Zimbabwe. When many of the people deported to Zimbabwe found their way back a few days later, and refused a demand to leave within ten days, they were driven out by their former neighbours.

The extreme hostility with which the post-apartheid state has responded to African migrants is well documented in numerous human rights and academic reports. Migrants to South Africa confront a notoriously ungenerous policy regime that is compounded by a bureaucracy and police force that are both systemically corrupt and prone to extorting money from migrants, documented or not, on the threat of arrest and deportation. There are many cases where South Africans have also been arrested and deported to countries they have never previously visited because they could not speak Zulu well, didn’t have the ‘right’ inoculation marks or were ‘too black.’ If the police suspect that someone may be an ‘illegal immigrant’ and she doesn’t have papers on her she will be detained in a holding cell and then sent to a repatriation centre to await deportation. If she is documented but doesn’t have papers on her she may still end up being deported as it is people picked on suspicion of being illegal that have to prove their legal right to be in the country. There is no burden of proof on the state. There is a right to one free phone call from the police holding cells and another from the repatriation centres but that right is routinely denied. Sometimes people whose presence in South Africa is perfectly legal just disappear. Their families only discover what has become of them after they have been deported. One consequence of this is that any one who thinks that they may be under suspicion has to carry their papers with them at all times. The similarity with the apartheid pass system has not escaped the notice of migrants.

The Lindela Repatriation Centre looms with a particular malevolence in the fears of migrants. Set in an old mining compound on the outskirts of Johannesburg its function is to hold illegal immigrants while they wait to be deported. The phrases ‘gross violations of human rights’ and ‘concentration camp’ role out with the word ‘Lindela’ in the language of human rights organisations as naturally as the word ‘criminals’ goes with ‘illegal immigrants’ in the language of the politicians, police and much of the popular media. Yet none of this resolute condemnation, much of which is undergirded by exhaustive empirical detail, has had any significant difference. Detailed human rights reports going back to 1999 describe routine violence, deliberate sleep deprivation, sexual assault, the denial of the right to a free phone call, appalling and appallingly limited food, a total lack of reading and writing materials, endemic corruption, unexplained deaths and extended periods of detention with out judicial review. There have been riots in Lindela going back to at least 2004. It is still hell. Senior people in the ANC Women’s League, including Nomvula Mokonyane, have financial interests in Lindela.

The state has not been alone in this. On radio talk shows, in newspapers and university lecture theatres it quickly becomes clear that the fears and stereotypes that white people projected onto black people under apartheid are now often projected, unapologetically, onto the poor in general and shack dwellers and migrants in particular. Things that can no longer be publicly said about black people can still be said about the poor, with and without papers. It is not unusual for middle class black people to take this up with enthusiasm. It’s been an open season for a long time. The fear and hostility of the old order have been redirected rather than overcome in the new order.

Theorizing Xenophobia: Michael Neocosmos

The most important attempt to theorise xenophobia in South African is a book by Michael Neocosmos called From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’: Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa. The book was published by Codesria in Dakar, Senegal in late 2006. Codesria do not have a distribution network equal to the quality of the work that they have published over the years and it has been more or less impossible to get a copy of the book in South Africa. But Codesria have put it online and a book that seemed to have fallen stillborn from the press is suddenly being widely read and discussed in the wake of the May pogroms.

Neocosmos rejects fashionable attempts to explain xenophobia in terms of postmodernity and globalisation and notes that it was in 1961 that Frantz Fanon described the kind of situation where “foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked.” For Neocosmos, following Fanon and the work of the Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, the essence of the problem is in the structure of the post-colonial state.

Neocosmos, following Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also takes Alain Badiou very seriously. He rejects the largely economistic understanding of politics that has typified influential sections of the academic left in South Africa in favour of a political understanding of politics. He argues that the debates on the academic left have largely been in favour of the state against the market and have tended to exclude any consideration for the agency of ordinary people. He sees in the statist orientation of this left a considerable complicity with the politics of liberalism which, in his diagnosis, can only see rights as something to be awarded and secured by the state.

His book gives a history of how apartheid denied South African citizenship to Africans and attempted, via the Bantustan system, to manufacture foreigners as a political and cultural identity. He also shows how this was continually challenged by popular democratic conceptions of citizenship. For instance Black Consciousness posited the lived experience of blackness as a principle of unity rather than ethnicity and so, against both the apartheid idea of ethnic Bantustan citizenship and the multi-racialism of the ANC, included Africans, Indians and people of mixed race in one non-racial political movement. Some trade unions, and in particular the National Union of Mine Workers, developed an understanding of citizenship based on place of work rather than place of origin. The mine workers’ union was even able to take this principle into the first moments of the post-apartheid state by securing citizenship for workers from Lesotho. And in the 1980s the United Democratic Front posited a citizenship based on opposition to apartheid which saw white and black people on both sides of its conception of the nation and its enemy.
For Neocosmos the radicalisation and democratisation of the popular struggles against apartheid in the second half of the 1980s, a process that in his analysis was forced on the leadership from below, created a new nation in struggle. He argues that the demobilisation and corporatisation of that politics, a process that began in 1989 and was more or less concluded by 1993, enabled a return to the exclusive power of the state to define citizenship.

In his view this was the worm that hid in the rose of the new democracy from the beginning. He points to the distinction in the constitution between citizens and persons and notes the consequent logic in frank statements by the ANC that it “can’t extend human rights to non-citizens.” But he is not replacing economism with legalism. He also argues that a considerable part of the motivation for the immediate commitment to the idea of ‘fortress South Africa’ was driven by an assumption that ‘hordes of foreigners’ would threaten South Africa’s aspiration to build a powerful modern state that could take its ‘rightful place on the international stage’. The continuities with apartheid thinking about South Africa as somehow outside of, superior to and endangered by Africa are clear. He also shows that the idea that the state could manage the poor by delivering basic services to a passive population led to an assumption that efficiency in this regard, and consequent gains in social cohesion, would be compromised by an increase in the number of citizens. For Neocosmos the ANC “is unable to think beyond the confines of exclusion and control…Popular organisational and militant democratic struggles are no longer within its ambit of thought.”

Recovery of Popular Emancipatory Politics: A Proposal

Neocosmos acknowledges the work done by NGOs to catalogue the rights abuses suffered by migrants at the hand of the South Africa state and provides a harrowing overview. Some of the evidence adduced is particularly striking. For instance while many instances are cited of politicians ascribing crime to undocumented migrants and conflating the categories of ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘criminal’ the fact is that 98% of people arrested on criminal charges in South Africa are legal citizens. Equally striking are the statistics for the numbers of Germans, Americans and British people who overstay their visas but are not arrested and do not end up in Lindela and are not deported. In the first months of 1996 the figure stood at 26 000. Neocosmos does not shy away from the strength of popular xenophobic sentiment but stresses that empirical research indicates that “popular attitudes towards foreigners are much more contradictory and not as systematically oppressive as in the case of state agencies.”

While he accepts the symptomatic observations of the human rights NGOs he rejects their diagnosis of the cause of those symptoms and their prescription for a remedy. In his view their extensive and detailed cataloguing of state and popular xenophobia has been undertaken in order to ensure that migrants are able to access their human rights, something which is “seen as the responsibility of the state under pressure from those same NGOs”. Human rights discourse is orientated around appeals to the state, not a popular democratic politics. It therefore lacks both the capacity to issue compelling prescriptions to the state and to undertake the practical work of engendering better modes of life within communities. All it can do is to make requests. Although he does not say this, it is notable that neither the advances in this discourse, nor its institutionalisation in formal civil society, have resulted in meaningful progress from the perspective of someone picked up by the police for being ‘too black’ or speaking Shangaan or French.

For Neocosmos “xenophobia and authoritarianism” are “a continuation of apartheid oppression” that are, in the end, a “product of liberalism”. He proposes, against the state centric politics of liberalism, a recovery of popular emancipatory politics. This argument certainly has much more going for it than most of the views bandied about after the May pogroms, many of which took the form of simultaneous recommendations for firmer police action, better state intelligence and more projects to educate the poor about human rights. With some modifications it may also be able to explain some aspects of the other forms of popular reaction that have been growing in intensity.

Grassroots Militancy

In recent months there have, in some areas, been public attacks on lesbians and women dressed in trousers or in skirts deemed too short. It is certainly the case that as poor women are expected to take over more and more of the work needed to keep families and communities going there is an implicit gendering to decisions about the price of water, the numbers of taps and toilets that are provided to shack settlements, the need for volunteers to take on cleaning work, the care of the sick and so on. But it is certainly not the case that, as with xenophobia, these kinds of attacks can credibly be said to directly follow the logic and practices of the state or to be in any way complicit with the law.

While racist arguments about culture are often still used to explain the attacks on women progressives tend to argue that they are due to a general economic disempowerment. There is certainly a systemic disempowerment consequent to the endless economic crisis that ordinary people must confront, even in boom times. But there is also a systemic disempowerment consequent to both the complimentary authoritarianism of technocratic state and NGO responses to poverty and the top down party control over most of the political spaces through which ordinary people can access the state. It is notable that these kinds of attacks on women have not occurred, and are in fact simply unthinkable, in places where grassroots movements in which women are strong have created a political space for the collective self empowerment of the excluded. The fact that these are not the only spaces in which these kinds of attacks are unthinkable does not diminish the record of democratic grassroots political projects in this regard.

As Neocosmos has noted in a recent essay the popular movements that have rebuilt a democratic grassroots militancy were able to successfully defend and shelter people at risk in the May pogroms and, on at least one occasion, confront attackers head on. There was not one attack in any of the more than 30 settlements where the largely Durban and Pietermartizburg based shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo is strong. Despite being crowded into ever fewer bits and pieces of urban land, all of which remain under threat from a state determined to ‘eradicate shacks by 2014’, the movement was also able to offer shelter to some people displaced in the attacks. In a widely circulated and translated statement Abahlali baseMjondolo declared that “An action can be illegal. A person cannot be illegal. A person is a person where ever they may find themselves. If you live in a settlement you are from that settlement and you are a neighbour and a comrade in that settlement.” The Landless People’s Movement in Johannesburg and the Anti-Eviction Campaign in Cape Town were also able to mount some opposition to the pogroms. In Khutsong, a town to the West of Johannesburg where popular conflict with the state has probably been most acute, the Merafong Demarcation Forum was also able to ensure safety. All of these organisations have, in the face of considerable repression boycotted elections and sought to build a militant grassroots politics outside of the party structures beholden to the state.

There is a sense in which crises are confrontation with the real. Certain kinds of assumptions, claims and speculations that can survive without a direct challenge melt away in the face of this kind of shock. Others emerge on a firmer footing. Neocosmos’ book has come out of the crisis with a lot more life than it had in April. But if the May crisis has appeared to offer some support to his analysis that analysis should certainly be extended. One obvious way in which the critique of the politics of liberalism should be developed would be to consider the various ways in which the South African poor are also excluded from substantive citizenship and the desperate rivalries that this can produce.

With an entrenched unemployment crisis that excludes around 40% of people from formal employment now compounded by the sudden escalation in food and transport prices there’s not much disagreement about the depth of economic exclusion. Of course people do invent new modes of solidarity and survivalist communalism to cope but a dangerous desperation is also rife. Not everyone is in a position to confront the prospect of entering their 30s without ever having had a decent job with equanimity. For people bent on plunder anyone who is vulnerable, as undocumented migrants living under a hostile state most certainly are, is at risk.

Exclusion from substantive citizenship is also a question of space. The South African state is seeking to reverse the popular desegregation of cities achieved since the 1980s. There are major projects to drive the poor out of flats in the city centres in the name of creating ‘World Class Cities’. Centrally located shack settlements are also under attack from a full fledged programme to ‘eradicate’ shacks by 2014. While most cities have one or two well funded projects to upgrade centrally located shack settlements they are the exceptions that legitimate the rule. The fact is that the state is beating the poor out of the cities in the name of ‘slum clearance’, the precise phrase used by apartheid, and before that colonialism, for the same purpose. The poor are being driven out of urban spaces over which there is sometimes a considerable degree of autonomous self management into regulated and commodified contemporary versions of the peripheral apartheid township – a space separate in every way from the fantasy of world class cities but far enough out of town for this fact to be tolerable. An often politically innovative urban proletariat which appropriated urban land, as well as electricity and water, and often, although not always, turned it into a commons organised with a considerable degree of popular autonomy from state power is being recomposed into an individualized set of consumers safely warehoused on the urban periphery. The return to forced removals is a direct attack on people’s livelihoods, access to education and health care, desire for an urban life and identity as citizens. With regard to the latter it is worth recalling that the denial of the right to the city was a central part of the denial of citizenship to Africans under apartheid. Every successful eviction increases the already severe overcrowding in the spaces that survive and escalates competition for space that can take all sorts of forms including ethnic and racial conflict amongst South Africans.

Despite more than 3 years of vigorous protests by the grassroots left across the country against local party councillors and their ward committees the reality of political exclusion doesn’t have much elite currency. Civil society doesn’t always easily recognise that democracy isn’t only about elections and NGOs. People who appropriated or forged substantive rights to citizenship through the insurgent popular struggles of the 80s, or who were promised full social inclusion in Mandela’s image of the nation, now find that, what ever their identity documents may say, they have been excluded from a key aspect of substantive citizenship - the right to speak, to be heard and to co-determine their future. Developmental processes are overwhelmingly technocratic and expert driven and the party is, for the very poor, now a top down structure that is used more for social control than as a space for popular discussion. In fact in many shack settlements party structures are the armed enforcers of state discipline. Many of the thousands of popular protests over the last few years (often clearly misnamed as ’service delivery’ protests by both the NGO left and the state) were aimed at trying to subordinate local party structures and representatives to popular power. It has been very striking that in many of these protests the people organising them have declared that they have returned to struggle because they have, again, ‘been made foreigners in our own country’. This crisis in citizenship caused by a widespread exclusion from substantive citizenship has expressed itself in some remarkable mobilisations that have united people with and without legal citizenship to struggle to democratise society from below. But in the absence of democratic organisation it can also take the terrifying form of a desire to assert one’s own citizenship by turning on the ‘real’ non citizens.

The popular democratic politics in which Neocosmos invests his theoretical hope is the practical politics that was able to defend and shelter people targeted in the May pogroms, and has previously, although covertly, offered the same protection from the state. It is a politics that moves from the bottom up and which the state and many NGOs, including those on the left, consider to be outside of professional civil society and its aspirations to manage the poor and, therefore, criminal. The police have been trying to beat it into submission since 2004.

Mbeki repressed the return of this politics and could travel to Haiti in his own jet. Aristide embraced this politics and was forced to leave Haiti in an American jet. But in Port-au-Prince and Johannesburg, against the odds, against the soldiers and the police, against the mob that have decided to become the police, against the expert and against the NGO it endures, fragile but alive.

by Fanuel Nsingo, Abahlali baseMjondolo

Zimbabwe, ……………..wait before you……………….!

Excitement gripped me when I was able to go back across the border to visit my family in Zimbabwe. Pleased as I was, I tried to ignore all the media reports on the country’s disregard of acceptable and proper treatment of human beings. Before going home, I braced myself for whatever the hell was to befall me! Imagine going back home to unpredictable situations, disastrous conditions, or even impending death - and when home is Zimbabwe this is no exaggeration. If you have been in South Africa you are immediately suspected of being MDC. Anyway, going home was the only way to please my mum!

From Johannesburg I boarded a bus directly to Harare, Zimbabwe. I paid 300 Rands for the trip and took at least seven hours to reach the Beitbridge Border Post. The border was highly-congested, with border officials dragging their feet at main checkpoints. My stay there was four hours. Later, the bus had to leave for Harare at around 5 o’clock in the morning. The bus took eight hours to reach Harare.

My arrival in the capital city was met by a great shock. There was no transport to ferry me to my small city of birth, Marondera. Familiar to my country’s economic woes, I immediately settled on the fuel disaster as the explanation. However, I waited by Fourth Street, just behind Roadport for any transport, and immediately arrived a smoking, dusty, ready-for-scrap Mazda T3500 lorry, and not wanting to miss it, I jostled alongside other stranded commuters onto its back. Along the way the driver demanded Z$500 million, as transport fares. He said this was to enable him to buy fuel.

As we drove past Ruwa, a small town just outside Harare, the black-marketeers of fuel waved down the driver. It was a clear signal that only Zimbabwe could run dry, but never the black-marketeers. Immediately, the driver parked by the roadside, but was told to restart and get fuelled in a small patch of thick bush, obviously to be hidden away from the raging battalion of the army or police. He complied. I tried to get as close to the black-marketeer as I could to grasp details of his conversation with the driver, but had to gather the two were arguing over the exact price of the ‘precious liquid’. It seemed the young man was attempting to refuel the lorry before settling on the actual price.

When I arrived in the newly-crowned city of Marondera[formerly a town, and recently given a city status], I just slept overnight, eager to catch the morning bus to my mother’s plot, that she was allocated by the ruling Zanu-PF party. The house in Marondera belongs to my grandfather, my mother’s stepfather. Currently, the four-bedroomed tiny property is home to my mother’s sister, together with her three children. Her first-born is a boy, who has two younger sisters as well. The next morning I took a lift to the Baker Plots that were grabbed from a Mr. Baker, a white farmer. Mr. Baker is one of the 4 000 white farmers whose farms were forcibly grabbed by the ruling government in 1997, under the influence of the late and former Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association leader, Chenjerai Hunzvi.

I paid Z$200 million from Marondera to Baker’s. Initially, the driver of the small, out-of-date obsolete Datsun Pulsar had asked for Z$300 million, arguing that the exchange rate of the ZimDollar Versus the South African Rand was unpredictable, thus the need to cater for the unexpected devaluation of the dollar. True to his utterances, and as I had to experience for myself during my short stay in Zimbabwe, the Z$ keeps falling on an hourly basis. To stay on the safe side, one has to keep a close and tight guard on the ‘now indispensable’ Tito Mboweni product.

As I reached the place, I was greeted by a commotion of chants of slogans and shouts, by ruling party youths at the local shopping centre. Then there was another shocking horror, the shelves in one of the stores were the emptiest and grubbiest in the whole world! Immediately, I rushed for my mother’s plot, and when she saw me, she burst into tears, wondering how on earth God had spared me from the ‘Xenophobia Attacks’. We hugged and kissed, and I told her, ‘Give thanks to Abahlali baseMjondolo’, to which she, who has never lived in a shack, responded curtly, ‘Who the hell’s that?!’ I mumbled to answer her as I felt I would shock her in my struggle for land and housing as an ‘Umhlali.’

When we were seated, I began by narrating how good Abahlali had been to me and told her all about the red T-shirts – at the same time pulling out the colours with pride, and showcasing the movement logo, all to her surprise. ‘That’s politics, my son!’, worried my mother. I continued with the different marches that I had been part of, the camp meetings, the regular fortnightly meetings, office work, drinking and eating in the same plate with the President of Abahlali. I wondered if the same could be done with the ailing and wilting Bob. I wondered at the ease by which I was proud to wear the Abahlali red. I wondered how difficult and burdening it must be to have to wear the old dictator’s picture on a shirt. Free at last, ain’t I?

The one and only cock at our roots was made to suffer the consequences of my return , as is the African custom. It had to be sacrificed for my arrival. How good the meal was, as my sister’s authority and expertise over the rural pots proved itself! No spices, just the boiled chicken and a few grains of salt. Of course no cooking oil or any fatty additives whatsoever these days. But the meal was perfect.

The next day mother forced me to wear the ZANU-PF T-Shirt and to attend an everyday compulsory ZANU-PF meeting. She was very worried that I would be under suspicion after having been away. When we arrived at the meeting place I heard war veterans boasting that they had just acquired knew knobkerries to beat those who had absconded from the previous day’s meeting. At first I thought it was a joke, but was shocked to see a young man being dragged in front of everyone, and thereafter being severely beaten. A certain headman was also being accused of defecting to the opposition MDC. He however managed to save his skin because of his ill-health, otherwise he would have received the canning. But others have been ironed on their backs until they admit to being MDC and promise that they have seen the errors of their ways and that they will be loyal to ZANU-PF.

When I was to return, mother wrote a letter to the President of Abahlali, stating how grateful she was for my good upkeep. She further narrated how difficult it was to survive, mentioning the billions of ZimDollars-for-nothing needed to survive on a daily basis. To this day, I feel pity for her.

When I got to Beitbridge for my intended journey into South Africa, I overhead some youths openly debating on who the richest man in Zimbabwe was. All the tycoons and bigwigs mentioned in that debate are Zanu-PF loyalists. One talkative youth even got to the extent of boasting about Phillip Chiyangwa, nephew of Robert Mugabe and former MP for Chinhoyi West. The youth was saying Chiyangwa’s pair of shoes could cost approximately US$5 000.00. His car could talk, he had a machine to wash his teeth, six wardrobes of shoes – from his Bulawayo-based G & D Shoes Engineering, twenty wardrobes of suits and so on. For your own information, the fallen MP was also booted out of the ruling party for allegedly engaging in espionage, selling all the ‘top secrets’ to the then Tony Blair-led government in England.

My question is; if people spend government resources to enrich themselves, to the extent of living luxurious and flamboyant lives, whilst 90% of the population are suffering, even starving, what is the motive behind this? If a pair of shoes is worth a life, how come the leadership is failing to dish out its leftovers or excesses towards the livelihood of the poor? Does ZANU-PF care about ordinary Zimbabweans at all? What other assets are the ruling party cronies hiding throughout the world? We are told that there is a struggle between Zimbabwe and England but it feels like a struggle between the rich and the poor in Zimbabwe.

As the events further unfolded, some MDC youths arrived at the Beitbridge Rank, not knowing about the worse to come. Within ten minutes of their arrival, the police began chasing them away, accusing them of serving a puppet leader, and warning them of arrests. The opposition youths could do nothing but listen to Mugabe’s bees. Immediately, an old, forget-my-past Mazda 323 dragged itself towards the rank and out came the ugliest face I have ever seen, wailing a loudhailer that ‘Operation Mirai Zvakanaka’ was to start in ten minutes time, therefore every street-trader, and all the ladies by the vegetable market, should ’shut down’ and attend an urgent meeting. ‘Operation Mirai Zvakanaka’ means ‘Operation Get Rightly Sorted Out’, literally, ‘Operation Know Your One and Only ZANU-PF Party.’ In Abahlali we come to a meeting with all our different ideas and experiences and discuss things together until we see a way forward together. We are free. In Zimbabwe ZANU-PF tells you want to think. If you don’t say publicly that think what you have been told to think you will be beaten, sometimes even killed.

After the ten minutes were over, the meeting was held, with youths ’sorting-out’ everybody who they had seen walking around, without attending the urgent call. I felt pity for Morgan Tsvangirai and his colleagues. Surely, this wasn’t an atmosphere for free and fair elections. Surely, this wasn’t an atmosphere for people with their own ideas to be safe. There is no freedom here.

The army is also brutalizing the people, the police have become the opposite of real protectors, and everybody is scared. What will happen to me now that my mother has been Zanufied? How will she fare if the MDC wins the June 27th run-off elections? Will I be made to carry the burden that she put herself in? On the other hand, the 4 000 white farmers, whose farms were grabbed took their case to the SADC Tribunal. The question is: If Uncle Bob retains power, and the farmers win the case on the 20th July, is he[Uncle Bob] going to budge, and immediately trigger a war? If he gives in to the tribunal demands, where is my mother going to go at her current old age, together with my brother and three sisters? Or above all else, shouldn’t I start a political party as soon as possible? A political party that is for land and freedom? A political party based on the full involvement of the poor, the street-traders who have been chased away from their stalls, the shack dwellers whose homes have been destroyed, the people who have been beaten and tortured? A political party in which people like my mother will be able to speak freely and will know that they will not be old and without a place where they can live and look after their children?

Prepared by: Nsingo Fanuel

Curse of the Black Gold, with pictures by Ed Kashi and text chosen by Michael Watts, is now online at: http://www.powerhousebooks.com/blackgold.pdf

It is essential reading. Ed Kashi’s introduction is below.

Ed Kashi

Shadows and Light in the Niger Delta

Iraq led me to the Niger Delta. Actually, it was my work in Iraq that brought me to the attention of Michael Watts, a Berkeley-based scholar. For over thirty years, Michael has studied issues of oil and conflict, especially in regards to the Niger Delta. With Michael’s guidance, on my first trip to Nigeria in July 2004, my eyes and heart were opened and my anger and disgust were ignited. To tell this difficult, but profoundly important, geopolitical story in a visual way became an obsession.

The Delta is the pivotal point where all of Nigeria’s plagues of political gangsterism, corruption, and poverty seem to converge. In late 2005, I returned alone to continue the project and faced severe restrictions and frustrations. There were moments in Port Harcourt, lying in a dark, hot, mosquito-infested room, when I wondered if I could continue to see beyond my own weaknesses to overcome the seemingly insuperable obstacles that challenged me at every turn.

With a commission from National Geographic magazine, I traveled again to Nigeria in 2006. This new level of support afforded me the opportunity to make breakthroughs to areas and subjects that had been unattainable before. During the course of this project, one of the most important subjects I felt compelled to capture in images was MEND, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta. They are an armed and formidable militant group based in the cities and creeks of the Niger Delta, particularly in the western region of the Delta in and around Warri (the so-called “Warri axis”). MEND is responsible for “shutting-in” 40 percent (at present: approximately 900,000 barrels per day) of Nigeria’s oil industry through making direct attacks on facilities, taking hostages, and generally creating an inhospitable and unsafe environment for the oil industry.

To get access to this group, it was necessary to communicate with a shadowy figure named Jomo Gbomo. There were rumors he was a South African arms dealer, but nobody knew for certain his true identity, whether he was someone local or if he might be based on another continent. Our only link was an email address. Whoever he was, Jomo was media-savvy and wrote with a flair and élan that was reminiscent of Subcomandante Marcos. The emails ranged from personal, direct conversations to general communiqués distributed to a list of journalists about the group’s activities. Generally, Jomo’s pronouncements presaged what would later appear in the media, or they were responses to developments on the ground, including attacks on oil facilities or hostage takings. At times it was comical, always surreal, but ultimately serious and potentially dangerous. Amidst the theater and drama of masked militants lay an insurgency in which, as Jomo put it, “bitter men” were engaged in a ferocious struggle with the Nigerian state. I reached a point with Jomo where we were communicating nearly every day, and I looked forward to his daily urgings, instructions, or vows to keep me safe. Even though I accomplished my goal of access to MEND, it wasn’t through Jomo but instead through other contacts. At least, that is what I thought, but in reality I’ll never know. In the end, my perceived intimacy and trust might have been nothing more than another shadow in an enigmatic place that an outsider can never fully understand. Following are excerpts of emails exchanged with Jomo over a two-month period in the summer of 2006. This ongoing online conversation lead me to important reporting, exclusive access to a difficult part of this project, and powerful images. I never met Jomo Gbomo. At least, I don’t think so.

From: Ed Kashi
Date: May 24, 2006 1:03:22 AM EDT
Dear Jomo,
I am a photojournalist working with the National Geographic magazine on a story about the Niger Delta. I have already been there two previous times to develop a project that is looking at the effects of nearly 50 years of oil on the communities, people and environment in the Delta. I understand you can help me get close to MEND, which I see as a vitally important part of this story. I will be coming to Port Harcourt in a few days and would appreciate any help you could give me to accomplish this task.
Best,
Ed Kashi

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: May 25, 2006 8:03:22 AM EDT
Thanks ed, we are always eager to get our story out. We had earlier resolved not to have any contacts with the media except by way of this email address. Perhaps that will be reconsidered. I will think about this and get back to you as soon as i can. Im a great fan of the national geographic.

From: Ed Kashi
Date: May 31, 2006 5:59:29 AM EDT
Dear Jomo,
I am now in Port Harcourt … If we could meet that would be great. I am hoping you can help me.
Thanks
Ed

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: June 1, 2006 2:20:21 PM EDT
Hi ed, sorry i will be unable to meet with you…
[On June 16, Ed and his fixer, Elias Courson, were captured and illegally detained by a Nigerian Joint Military Task Force that was based at an oil flow station in Nembe. They were detained for four days and the story made headlines in the Nigerian press as well as running on the BBC and Reuters.]

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: July 1, 2006 11:19:04 AM EDT
Hi ed, i read about your experience. The international media shares your views. The nigerian government and
its security apparatus is brutal. Extra-judical killings is usual in nigeria but this time, people who have fought with us were victims. I promise you we will repay this debt ten fold. When you come in august, you
will meet me and all my senior commanders. However i will not grant any interviews nor allow myself to be
photographed. You may be allowed to speak with and film any of my commanders who may be willing to speak with you. We will give you a comprehensive tour of the delta as you have not seen it. This is a promise, God willing.

From: Ed Kashi
Date: July 21, 2006
Dear Jomo,
…I am planning to return to the delta in August to finish my project for National Geographic. I appreciate
any cooperation you can offer at that time.

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: July 24, 2006 12:28:45 PM EDT
… this return date ensures you will be on time for the next wave of our attacks. This will be unrelenting
and more punishing on the oil industry. You will be taken as far as you wish. We are capable of taking you through the states of the delta, meeting with our units scattered across the niger delta. You will be shown through villages that the nigerian government will not wish you to see as well as locations the nigerian military will not venture near. The choice remains yours. Decide how far you are willing or able to go. You will meet me but i dont know how much good that will be as i will not be granting any recorded interviews. As promised however, you may be permited to speak with any of my ground commanders who consents to an interview. …

From: Ed Kashi
Date: July 24, 2006 12:35:56 PM EDT
Cc: tom o’neill
Dear Jomo,
If it is not necessary to meet with you, then better to keep the security situation less stressful for both of us. …The writer, Tom O’Neill, will be accompanying me on this trip and he will need to do interviews with your commanders. …In terms of how far I am willing to go, my main concern is putting myself in a situation where I am with your men and we encounter Nigerian security forces. … I look forward to your next instructions. thanks, Ed

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: July 24, 2006 1:22:06 PM EDT
Hi, your safety is of great concern to us otherwise, how would our story get out? …When we take you through the creeks, we will ensure that you meet no security operatives and will always be taken in a clearly
civilian boat, a good distance from our fighters. Like i said the choice remains yours. Be certain you will get all you ask for on this trip

From: Ed Kashi
Date: August 13, 2006 7:05:42 PM EDT
Jomo,
we are all quite shaken by the fierce gun battles that just took place right outside of our compound. We thought they were coming for us, but thank goodness we are fine. I can see things have heated up

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: August 13, 2006 7:26:16 PM EDT
I was informed so. No one can take you guys anyway, Be sure about that. Im more worried about you been hit by a stray bullet or something. They came for the other white guys. If by any chance you are taken be sure to tell anyone you are here at our instance. You will be released immediately or else………………? Always give me notice of your movement and sign in each night for your safety. I want to be able to act in good time if the unexpected occurs

From: Ed Kashi
Date: August 14, 2006 2:03:34 PM EDT
Dear Jomo,
we have been turned down by Shell for tomorrow and Thursday due to increased hostage taking, … I have spoken with my man in Port Harcourt and he sounds a bit skeptical but he told me that a leaking well that he showed us last week has exploded and is on fire. This is exactly what we need for our work.…

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: August 14, 2006 2:15:41 PM EDT
I will instruct that. Expect a call.

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: August 21, 2006 7:21:08 AM EDT
Hi ed, im sorry i may not be able to arrange the trip for you today … may be the end of this month. In trying to effect the release of all hostages in the delta, we sent out 14 of our fighters to a community in bayelsa holding a shell worker. They effected his release and on the way back to the camp, were ambushed by aobut 100 nigerian army soldiers … lost 10 of our fighters in this attack …in moourning. …big blow to us … attack was unprovoked and without warning…impossible at this point to do anything else. Hope you understand.

Yours truly

From: Jomo Gbomo

Date: August 28, 2006 8:22:00 AM EDT
Hi ed, please let me know when you get into warri I have arranged for you to speak with tompolo, the most
superior ground commander in the western delta. Im afraid for now, that is the closest you will get to me.

I have never allowed this sort of contact in the past and this is like a compensation for not keeping to my instructed that across the entire niger delta. Please abide by whatever rules you are subjected to when you
arrive at the first camp, …

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: August 28, 2006 11:35:19 AM EDT
…No one knows me as jomo. they know who sent you there and you may try but i doubt if anyone will speak
to you about me.…

From: Jomo Gbomo
Date: August 28, 2006 2:20:08 PM EDT
…it is important to us the world understands the galvanizing factor beneath our struggle. We have been
called all kinds of names in the american media by those who have not bothered to be as thorough as you
have chosen to be. …It is assumed that our motivation is derived from a desire to steal little amounts of
crude oil from pipelines. What we are fighting for aside from what we term to be a liberation of the niger
delta peoples from 50 years of political and economic slavery, is that the truth be heard everywhere about
our fight for the freedom of the peoples of the niger delta who have cried out in vain for help. The truth

as we all know is unambiguos and no matter how well camoflaged, will not remain hidden forever. We hope the truth …will come to light …We have nothing to say to anyone, go around as freely as you wish and decide if we have reason to fight.
I never heard from Jomo again while in the Niger Delta. I made my way to the funerals and creeks where MEND was through my own contacts. But I’ll never know how much was triangulated behind my back. As always, the real decisions took place in the shadows, out of my sight. In September of 2007, a man purported to be Jomo Gbomo was arrested in Angola while trying to make an arms deal. Communiqués from Jomo continue to this day, albeit with a slightly slicker tone and voice. My assumption is that whoever
Jomo is doesn’t matter at this point. The struggle that MEND represents has grown beyond one person and will continue its fight until real change occurs in the Niger Delta.

Currently in the Delta, an unrestricted military struggle is taking place between state security forces with an awful reputation and a violent state machinery. An imbalance exists between secrecy and publicity about their causes, and it is this disparity that sustains the shadows of this troubled land. The violence of the Delta is a reaction to a long history of exploitation, the presence of transnational corporations, a style of politics where violence is often encouraged and supported by politicians, and the sheer welter of groups, gangs, and cults without a leadership.

The Niger Delta is one of the most difficult places I’ve ever worked. The people are hesitant and suspicious of outsiders, the terrain is tricky with remote areas reachable only by small boats and along every road and waterway danger lurks for the intruder. In June 2006, I experienced the worst incident of the entire trip. While attempting to photograph flow stations in the creeks of Nembe, I was taken into custody and detained illegally by the Nigerian military. The local boatmen we hired had lied about the presence of military in order to get extra cash. We knew if there was military present at the installations, we were not allowed to photograph. We relied on faulty information and paid the price. My fixer and I were detained for four
harrowing days, our possessions and equipment were confiscated, we were locked in a room and were never told our fate. In the end, we were released because of the great work of Nigerian friends, human rights workers, the media, National Geographic, and my wife, Julie. Most people are not as fortunate and would have endured a much longer, more painful incarceration. This event left me empowered and even more determined to pursue my goal of creating a visual body of work to tell the untold story of the Niger Delta.
I always try to remain open in my heart and mind. This is what makes life worth living and allows one the opportunity to witness the unimaginable. From my chance encounter with Michael, I was given the opportunity to work in the Niger Delta—to shed light on this world of shadows.

Open Democracy, 22 June 2008

by Hope

This morning I woke up to the sound of my cellphone beeping messages about what was happening in Harare. The day started to roller-coaster forwards from there, fuelled by adrenaline and anxiety.

While I was scrambling to get the pages of the blog to open up to add news received via sms and emails, the question going through my mind the whole time was: “Will the MDC call the rally off or not?” At that stage my mind hadn’t reached far enough forwards to contemplate whether they might consider pulling out of the 27 June run-off.

I felt genuinely frightened this morning, and at one point I said to a friend: “I am scared; today could be our ‘Sharpeville massacre’.”

I wasn’t sure how the day would play out at all. In my mind I was imagining scenes of MDC supporters determinedly, stubbornly and bravely walking to the rally to be met with more than a thousand thugs armed with weapons and guided by the kind of brute arrogance that comes with knowing they can do what they like and not be punished. I imagined hundreds of innocent civilians being bloodily battered to pieces, possibly trapped within the confines of a stadium, hemmed in with nowhere to escape to.

I was slightly shaking with anxiety but there was a part of my mind that had a sense of certainty that if this did happen, this brutal scene would be exactly the type of image (if captured on cameras) that would galvanise the southern African community into action.

Until now it hasn’t seemed to matter how many reports have been written, how many icons splattered on a map, how many terror albums compiled; nothing has been enough to force the southern African community to make the kind of categorical unflinching statements we hope will be forthcoming. This morning I was talking about how the community entrusted with our lives needed to be shamed into action by the scenes of barbarism that people consider to be typically “African” - ‘TIA’ as one of my colleagues keeps saying, to infuriate me.

I didn’t want the bloodbath to take place and my heart this morning was saying “Stop the rally, don’t let it happen”. My head was in muddle though, fearful that the MDC leaders would be struggling with the same twisted logic my own head was engaging in, and I was fearful that they might believe a dramatic confrontation needed to happen.

Now, with the announcement of the cancellation of the run-off sinking in, I am starting to think the horrible ethical dilemma posed by the stadium this morning symbolised the great challenge facing our country and facing those who have to make the terrible big decisions.

Where do we draw the line because, God knows, it has to be drawn somewhere?

The rally didn’t go ahead despite the fact the courts declared it should go ahead and it was entirely legal, even within Zimbabwe’s perverted legal system.

The MDC didn’t call the people to push forward relentlessly and face the bullets, and as a result the world won’t see the type of images they crave, the type that stir the heart and lift the soul when they see a great human capacity to confront evil head-on – the ones Hollywood films thrive on.

There will be no pictures of tanks rolling forwards to a solitary man, and no one standing up fearful but brave in the face of a gun, no one lying down peacefully while thugs exhaust themselves through violence on passive bodies.

Make no mistake, my heart is heavy now; I am as seduced by bravery and drama as much as any other person. But my heart is heavy because the decision that has been taken is a massive one; the struggle just got harder and we have to think of new ways to battle on.

The tools we relied on, the instruments of the law that we have constantly made use of to prove our intention to bring about to change our country through civilised means, have finally given up and broken in our hands. There are no spare parts in Zimbabwe to re-service any tools, far less for precious valuable ones like the rule of law, which is carefully crafted through the centuries.

The death of democracy

What died in Zimbabwe today was democracy, not hope: Robert Mugabe has finally killed democracy.

He stands before us unhinged by his lust for power and determined to go forwards in a poll where he will be the only candidate. There is something about this image that disgusts me and makes me want to turn my eyes away from him because it is too embarrassing, even for someone who enjoys watching him fall flat on his face, to witness this level of pathetic desperation.

I am consoled by one small point and that is that Robert Mugabe, the man who initially instilled pride in African people around the world for being a liberation hero, will end his days firmly labelled a despot. This last deathblow to freedom reveals him as an isolated individual, shameless and devoid of pride and dignity. He no longer even has the last rags of credibility and legitimacy that his previously rigged elections gave him - nothing to drape over and hide his grubby ambitions for power.

I find bitter-sweet comfort in the fact that the last election Zimbabwe ever had that could be considered “free and fair” enough to be marginally acceptable internationally, was the one where Robert Mugabe lost both the parliamentary and the presidential poll. Comfort too in the fact that it was those in the rural areas who finally turned their backs on him.

Robert Mugabe will be damned by that, and he will be damned by his undignified scrabble for power regardless of the will of the people.

While I know that there are people all around the world who are witnessing today’s events with deep sadness, I think we should all stop short of viewing this is the first step in a big win for Robert Mugabe and Zanu (PF). It is a Pyrrhic victory, and the full weight of what it will cost him and his party is yet to be determined.

What happens when Mugabe crowns himself king again on what was to be election-day, Friday 27 June, despite the fact he polled less votes than his rival in the first round on 29 March?

What happens when he has to contend with presiding over a parliament dominated by elected MDC members voted for by the people?

How many dignitaries will fly in and be brave enough to eat and feast and celebrate his sordid win with him at a farce of an inauguration ceremony?

How many people will want to stand so close to a man who stinks of corruption?

“Votes that would have cost us lives”

None of this addresses the critical choice that has been made by the MDC leaders today, a day that will be one of those historical markers in our nation’s history.

The decision that Morgan Tsvangirai has made today is probably the very opposite of the one that Robert Mugabe would make if he was wearing Tsvangirai’s shoes. Robert Mugabe is a sadist: he unflinchingly wreaks the worst kind of brutality on his people. In contrast, today has shown us that Morgan Tsvangirai is clearly a man who carries the burden of moral responsibility more heavily, and he has decided that he is not the kind of leader who can ask his people to die in his battle to win a leadership contest.

The sentence which stands out for me in the MDC press statement is this: “We in the MDC cannot ask them to cast their vote on June 27 when that vote will cost them their life”.

It isn’t simply about voting: the fact is that the changes in Zimbabwe’s legislation which made it possible for the opposition movement to thwart Mugabe’s tried and trusted rigging tricks unfortunately also handed Mugabe and his thugs a roadmap to all his victims. By displaying the polling results on the walls outside the polling stations - the scores on the doors - the world and Zimbabwean citizens knew the result before it had been processed by Zanu PF’s creative number-crunching team, and made it difficult for him it to rig. But it also told Mugabe, right down to the wards within towns, who voted against him, and where they lived.

Those people who crave the images of bravery I mentioned before should hold this picture in their minds: a poor person standing in a polling station, casting a vote against a violent dictator, despite the fact they live in a rural area. There’s your man courageously facing a bullet with dignity!

On 29 March the gun was being held behind Mugabe’s back, ready to whip out and use against a civilian when he needed it to be used. The 27 June elections are different: this time the gun would have almost literally been held to civilian heads because those brave people were being asked to cast their votes before the hard cruel eyes of the Zanu (PF) loyalists that the government has recruited and flooded the polling stations with.

How many times should people who are growing poorer by the day be asked to face a gun simply to prove a point to an incalcitrant regional community?

When can we all conclude that they have faced the bullet enough times to say: “OK, we’ve shown you we have done all we can, and now it’s over to you”?

I didn’t have to make the decision that was made today, but I can understand why it was made, and respect the decision that was taken, even if I am not completely sure yet that it was the right one.

But I am not stupid either: Mugabe is about as vicious as they come and I am sure that refusing to participate in the elections will not bring an end to the terror despite any suggestion to that effect in the MDC statement.

There is no doubt in my mind that Mugabe will continue to bludgeon people, to firmly and thoroughly smash the opposition movement and human rights groups into submission, and to try and drive them out of the country. The Mugabe I have come to know will now be strategising on ways forward to ensure he never ever has to lose one of his own rigged elections again.

Having said that, it is equally true to say that if the MDC had participated in this next election that that wouldn’t have stopped the violence either.

Mugabe will never go quietly: he has told us clearly that only God can take him out of power, so this aging lunatic means to take our nation literally to a the point of genocide if he loses. If that happened it would be a vicious one-sided bloodbath.

There is no easy way for the MDC to contend with the political violence heaped on a civilian population. In relation to political violence and the elections, they were damned if they did, but also damned if they didn’t participate.

The decision to withdraw, for me, is better understood in terms of the first part of the sentence rather than the second: “We in the MDC cannot ask them to cast their vote on 27 June when that vote will cost them their life”.

This isn’t about saving lives because no decision is likely to stop the butcher from continuing to butcher people. This decision says more to me about the MDC’s inability to ask people to do something that they know will be used as justification to kill people.

This decision may not save lives but it does mean that Mugabe now needs to find a different excuse for beating people than the one he has relied on up until now: “You voted for the MDC” no longer applies, and now he has to slash and cut people simply because they exist, and simply because he is losing power.

I freely admit that if I had to make a choice between having a ruthless leader who could unflinchingly lead his people to their deaths like lambs to slaughter, or one that who cares enough to step back from the heat to try and save a few lives, I would choose the latter. I am sickened by the violence and I want our nation to have a leader that cares more for the lives of the people than he does for power.

Mugabe isn’t that man and the nation voted to give Morgan Tsvangirai the chance to prove he was. This decision today certainly shows that Tsvangirai doesn’t have a taste for sacrificing lives or for using violence as the means to gain power and I am glad for that. Whether the decision he has made takes us all one step closer to lasting peace or not is still to be determined.

Our lives are in SADC’s hands

There are some phrases that have been written so many times over the last few years that they start to sound like hollow clichés, and one of them is “This is a challenge to SADC”.

The decision made by the MDC leaders passes on massive responsibility to the SADC community. Today is the day democracy died in Zimbabwe, but there is no getting away from the fact that it is a death that SADC – and especially Thabo Mbeki – has presided over and watched happen before their eyes.

I can’t imagine how SADC can endorse Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s leader and still retain any modicum of integrity in the eyes of the world as a body that takes peer review seriously.

I can’t imagine how they can watch Mugabe use the senatorial seats in his gift to develop an upper house that can overrule the democratically elected majority in the lower house, and also claim that they have watched the will of the people prevail.

How will any SADC nation ever be able to say that they give a damn about democracy and human rights, and that they are able to manage their own affairs in this area, if they allow a man to murder, torture and steal his way to power before the world’s eyes?

SADC holds Zimbabwean lives in its hands now: Mugabe long ago addicted responsibility for his people and cast them into the darkness, and the MDC have now stepped back and placed themselves alongside the people who have done all they can but have run out of options. SADC has to respond. They now have to do something that will not only resolve the Zimbabwean crisis but also re-ignite faith in African politics.

The last thing that gives me some measure of comfort is derived from the “long view” I take of things: I am glad the MDC didn’t stay in this battle until the country reached a point where civilians had no choice but to take up weapons against the leadership to defend their own lives.

I am glad they didn’t hand Mugabe the one thing that might have “balanced” his use of violence, and that would be to give him the excuse that the violence was “mutual” and he was not entirely responsible for it. I was beginning to feel – especially this morning – that Mugabe was becoming more and more extreme in a bid to taunt the MDC into retaliating.

There is still a chance that violence might spiral out of control as brutalised people grow more desperate, but if it does happen, it happens under SADC’s watch. They can stop it and they can also restore democracy to Zimbabwe and give us a new lease of life; the question now is whether they have the political will and moral fibre to do so.

As for the rest of us, we will struggle on as we always have done.

Sokwanele, 22 June 2008

MDC Press Release:

At 1500hrs President Tsvangirai announced that he and the MDC will no longer participate in the 27th of June 2008 Presidential run off election.

President Tsvangirai stated that, “The MDC won the 29th of March election despite the conditions that were far from free and fair. Our party’s message of peaceful, democratic change and rebuilding a new Zimbabwe enjoy the support of vast majority of Zimbabweans.”

“Our election victory confirmed this to Mugabe and since that date he and his supporters have been waging a war against the people of Zimbabwe.

This violent retributive agenda has seen over 200 000 people internally displaced and over 86 MDC supporters killed, over 20 000 houses have been destroyed, and over 10 000 people injured and maimed in this orgy of violence. ”

President Tsvangirai went on to list specific electoral conditions that make a free and fair election impossible.

He concluded by saying that; “Given the totality of these circumstances we believe a credible election, which reflects the will of the people is impossible.

The militia, war veterans and Mugabe himself have made it clear that anyone that votes for me in the coming election faces a very real possibility of being killed

Zimbabweans have also shown how brave and resilient they can be over years of brutality, impoverishment and intimidation. They are dedicated to a new democratic Zimbabwe.

We in the MDC, can not ask them to cast their vote on June 27 when that vote will cost them their life”

Therefore, we in the MDC have resolved that we will no longer participate in this violent illegitimate shame of an election process”

A fuller statement to follow

Sanhati, 20 June 2008

1. India’s Emerging Food Security Crisis: The Consequences of the Neoliberal Assault on the Public Distribution System - Analytical Monthly Review
2. A man-made famine - Raj Patel, The Guardian
3. The World Food Crisis: Sources and Solutions - Fred Magdoff, Monthly Review
4. Manufacturing a Food Crisis - Walden Bellow, The Nation
5. Global food crisis: ‘The greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model’ - Ian Angus, Socialist Voice
6. Soaring prices are causing hunger around the world - Washington Post Editorial
7. The World’s Growing Food-Price Crisis - Time magazine

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India’s Emerging Food Security Crisis: The Consequences of the Neoliberal Assault on the Public Distribution System

An editorial from Analytical Monthly Review

Today, but few can recall memories of the Bengal famine of 1943 and 1944. Most disturbingly, after almost two decades of “reform” and a full decade or more of a nonstop media festival of growth rates and India Shining songs and chants, a massive acute food crisis is again a possibility. For the rulers of India such concerns, while now unavoidable, remain highly abstract. The memories of Bengal famine are again of special importance. Ashok Mitra, in his memoir Apila-Chapila (Ananda Publishers, 2003) [in English translation A Prattler’s Tale (SAMYA, 2007)], tells of millions from the countryside dragging themselves to the cities to beg and to die in the streets. “We went to college, stepping over these live corpses, these half-dead men, women and children. It was an appalling situation. Yet the daily lives of the middle and upper classes were largely unaffected.” Those with similar experience were a guiding force in the creation of post-independence food security programs that, for all their faults and inequalities, achieved a significant rise in per capita foodgrain and calorie consumption over the four decades from 1950. This achievement was swiftly wiped out by the period of neoliberal reform. Already by 2004 foodgrain absorption per capita had dropped to the 150 kilograms per year level of 1950-51, a fall of over 20 kilograms from levels achieved by the 1990s.

The consequences of over a decade of neoliberal hunger are what make the current conjunction of global foodgrain price rise and severe weather events, such as the recent Burmese cyclone, the Australian drought, the extraordinarily severe Chinese winter, a matter requiring urgent attention. Famine is not the result of a failed monsoon or other extraordinary extreme shortage that exhausts what under normal circumstances would be abundant food reserves. Even the most efficient historical systems of food stocks, such as that of Ming China, ran into the year that exhausts reserves. Widespread hunger, not famine, is the result. Only when a population has been nutritionally deprived for an extended period does the year of extraordinary shortage become the year of famine. Utsa Patnaik, our leading specialist in the agrarian economy, asserts that — although wartime burdens placed upon India by the British were a primary cause — the Bengal famine was largely the result of “the preceding three decades of declining nutrition in Bengal which had seen a much larger than average drop in per capita foodgrains availability, by nearly 40% between 1911 and 1947.” It is precisely this situation in which we now find ourselves. For most Indians a persistent decline in available calories has marked the neoliberal era. A recent useful study (Ranjan Ray, “Diversity in Calorie Sources and Undernourishment during Rapid Economic Growth,” EPW, 23rd February 200 used household calorie intake data from recent National Sample Survey rounds and generally accepted minimum gender specific daily calorie requirements for rural and urban populations to compose a “prevalence of undernutrition” index that would permit comparison over time. The percentage of rural Indian households that were undernourished rose from 48% at the time of NSS Round 43 (1987- to 67% at NSS Round 57 (2001-2). Undernourished urban households rose from 37% in 1987-8 to 51% in 2001-2. Things have worsened since 2002, as population growth has overwhelmed rapidly declining domestic rates of growth of food production and rural poverty has accelerated. It is this decade of increasing prevalence of malnutrition and hunger that threatens disaster as a result of an emerging food security problem.

The primary defense for food security remains a badly weakened Public Distribution System (PDS). The PDS was developed in the 1960s both to provide food to deficit regions and all strata of the population and to create sufficient effective demand to encourage a growing agricultural production. The PDS took advantage of increased yields of the “green revolution” to fashion a system of subsidies that despite all global price fluctuations guaranteed farmers a price above costs, moved foodgrains from the favored surplus areas of “green revolution” production to deficit areas, and sold foodgrains at a price low enough to ensure adequate offtake. Though always beset with problems, the PDS was at base a success and achieved a substantial increase in per capita consumption of calories. After 1991, intense pressure from the IMF and the World Bank to reduce the budget deficit brought first a sharp rise in the PDS price of foodgrains unmatched by higher prices for farmers, and then the introduction of “Targeted PDS” in 1997. Within ten years all that had been gained over a generation was lost. “Targeting” involved the near-criminal use of indefensible “Poverty Lines” to subject a vast impoverished population to paying prevailing market prices for essentials. Though accompanied by hypocritical expressions of concern for the poor from both World Bank and Indian neoliberals, targeting was a deliberate and successful attack on the PDS system as a whole. As Utsa Patnaik has said:

If one looks at the history of targeting in other countries, it becomes clear that it has always been a prelude to winding up of state intervention in procurement. That has been the ultimate aim of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. They specifically say that the state should not intervene to buy and sell at prices other than global prices. The WTO agreement on agriculture states that for food security purposes, the government can maintain food stocks but then, at the same time, it says that the government cannot offer farmers prices that are higher than global market prices. Global prices are very volatile. The government’s role here is to protect both the farmer and the consumer. The whole rationale of the PDS lies in that. - (Interview by TK Rajalakshmi, Frontline April, 200

And indeed the targeted PDS has gone a long way to the destruction of the system. According to NSS Report on Public Distribution System and Other Sources Of Household Consumption, 2004-05, 58 per cent of subsidised foodgrains do not reach Below Poverty Line (”BPL”) families, as 22 per cent reach Above Poverty Line (”APL”) families, while 36 per cent are sold in the black market. Only 57 per cent of BPL households have ration cards, while the homeless often do not have any. Only 28 per cent of the rural poor have benefited from any type of government food assistance schemes, and for urban areas the figure is just 9.5 per cent. Over half (51%) of rural households with the smallest landholdings (less than 0.01 hectares) do not possess ration cards that entitle them to monthly rations of rice, wheat, sugar and kerosene under the PDS. See . A more effective means of “targeting” was Chidambaram’s budget proposal, in long overdue acknowledgement of the desperate agricultural crisis, to forgive bank debt to farmers. Of course the richer farmers have larger outstanding loans and would benefit the most, and the poorest forced to subject themselves to the village usurers would not benefit at all. The neoliberals are not against subsidies that benefit the more prosperous.

This introduction of “free market forces” into food production and distribution has amounted to, in fact, murder. At first, as was inevitable in a market system subjected to strong deflationary pressures from World Bank, IMF and governmental authorities, prices shot down and small farmers lost in sequence their profits, their lands and their lives. Then as world market prices for essential foods shot up — the result of the U.S. exporting its inflation to the rest of the world to finance its aggression in Iraq and the U.S. provision of vast subsidies to turn foodgrains into fuel — masses living in hunger are driven to the verge of starvation while foodgrains they cannot afford to buy accumulate in the warehouses. We know that no long-term solution is possible absent revolutionary land reform, but neoliberal policies have brought the nation to the point where the vagaries of climate could produce famine not experienced in two generations. This desperate situation demands the immediate abolition of targeting and the introduction of universal PDS with an effective system for public supervision.

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A man-made famine

By Raj Patel, The Guardian

For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging.

Earlier this week, Zoellick waxed apocalyptic about the consequences of the global surge in prices, arguing that free trade had become a humanitarian necessity, to ensure that poor people had enough to eat. The current wave of food riots has already claimed the prime minister of Haiti, and there have been protests around the world, from Mexico, to Egypt, to India.

The reason for the price rise is perfect storm of high oil prices, an increasing demand for meat in developing countries, poor harvests, population growth, financial speculation and biofuels. But prices have fluctuated before. The reason we’re seeing such misery as a result of this particular spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends.

Before he replaced Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, Zoellick was the US trade representative, their man at the World Trade Organisation. While there, he won a reputation as a tough and guileful negotiator, savvy with details and pushy with the neoconservative economic agenda: a technocrat with a knuckleduster.

His mission was to accelerate two decades of trade liberalisation in key strategic commodities for the United States, among them agriculture. Practically, this meant the removal of developing countries’ ability to stockpile grain (food mountains interfere with the market), to create tariff barriers (ditto), and to support farmers (they ought to be able to compete on their own). This Zoellick did often, and enthusiastically.

Without agricultural support policies, though, there’s no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth. No option to support sustainable smaller-scale farmers, because they’ve been driven off their land by cheap EU and US imports. No option to dip into grain reserves because they’ve been sold off to service debt. No way of increasing the income of the poorest, because social programmes have been cut to the bone.

The reason that today’s price increases hurt the poor so much is that all protection from price shocks has been flayed away, by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank.

Even the World Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Groupadmits (pdf) that the bank has been doing a poor job in agriculture. Part of the bank’s vision was to clear away the government agricultural clutter so that the private sector could come in to make agriculture efficient. But, as the Independent Evaluation Group delicately puts it, “in most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew.” After the liberalisation of agriculture, the invisible hand was nowhere to be seen.

But governments weren’t allowed to return to the business of supporting agriculture. Trade liberalisation agreements and World Bank loan conditions, such as those promoted by Zoellick, have made food sovereignty impossible.

This is why, when we see Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF wailing about food prices, or Zoellick using the crisis to argue with breathless urgency for more liberalisation, the only reasonable response is nausea.

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The World Food Crisis - Sources and Solutions

By Fred Magdoff, Monthly Review

An acute food crisis has struck the world in 2008. This is on top of a longer-term crisis of agriculture and food that has already left billions hungry and malnourished. In order to understand the full, dire implications of what is happening today it is necessary to look at the interaction between these short-term and long-term crises. Both crises arise primarily from the for-profit production of food, fiber, and now biofuels, and the rift between food and people that this inevitably generates.

‘Routine’ Hunger before the Current Crisis

Of the more than 6 billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion—about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18,000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition (Associated Press, February 18, 2007).

Lack of production is rarely the reason that people are hungry. This can be seen most clearly in the United States, where despite the production of more food than the population needs, hunger remains a significant problem. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2006 over 35 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 13 million children. Due to a lack of food adults living in over 12 million households could not eat balanced meals and in over 7 million families someone had smaller portions or skipped meals. In close to 5 million families, children did not get enough to eat at some point during the year.

In poor countries too, it is not unusual for large supplies of wasted and misallocated food to exist in the midst of widespread and persistent hunger. A few years ago a New York Times article had a story with the following headline “Poor in India Starve as Surplus Wheat Rots” (December 2, 2002). As a Wall Street Journal headline put it in 2004 “Want Amid Plenty, An Indian Paradox: Bumper Harvests and Rising Hunger” (June 25, 2004).

No ‘Right to Food’

Hunger and malnutrition generally are symptoms of a larger underlying problem—poverty in an economic system that recognizes, as Rachel Carson put it, no other gods but those of profit and production. Food is treated in almost all of the world’s countries as just another commodity, like clothes, automobiles, pencils, books, diamond jewelry, and so on. People are not considered to have a right to purchase any particular commodity, and no distinction is made in this respect between necessities and luxuries. Those who are rich can afford to purchase anything they want while the poor are often not able to procure even their basic needs. Under capitalist relations people have no right to an adequate diet, shelter, and medical attention. As with other commodities, people without what economists call “effective demand” cannot buy sufficient nutritious food. Of course, lack of “effective demand” in this case means that the poor don’t have enough money to buy the food they need.

Humans have a “biological demand” for food—we all need food, just as we need water and air, to continue to live. It is a systematic fact of capitalist society that many are excluded from fully meeting this biological need. It’s true that some wealthy countries, especially those in Europe, do help feed the poor, but the very way capitalism functions inherently creates a lower strata of society that frequently lacks the basics for human existence. In the United States there are a variety of government initiatives—such as food stamps and school lunch programs—aimed at feeding the poor. Yet, the funding for these programs does not come close to meeting the needs of the poor, and various charities fight an uphill battle trying to make up the difference.
In this era relatively few people actually die from starvation, aside from the severe hunger induced by wars and dislocations. Most instead become chronically malnourished and then are plagued by a variety of diseases that shorten their lives or make them more miserable. The scourge of malnutrition impedes children’s mental and physical development, harming them for the rest of their lives.

The Acute and Growing Crisis: The Great Hunger of 2008

At this moment in history there are, in addition to the “routine” hunger discussed above, two separate global food crises occurring simultaneously. The severe and acute crisis, about two years old, is becoming worse day by day and it is this one that we’ll discuss first. The severity of the current crisis cannot be overstated. It has rapidly increased the number of people around the globe that are malnourished. Although statistics of increased hunger during the past year are not yet available