Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

[Blackstar*]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

While some of us discuss Cuba - which is not a black-led country - the black on black crime of corruption and the white/Asian on black crime of spoliation continue unchecked... Why, why, why?

Foreigners reeling in profits from Jamaica's fishing waters
published: Friday | October 13, 2006

Camilo Thame, Business Reporter

More than two decades after the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea gave Jamaica a 200-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the waters south of the island, it is foreigners, rather than Jamaicans, who are reeling in the catch of nearly J$50 billion a year, by some estimates.

And as these vessels, from neighbouring countries as far away as Japan and South Korea in Asia, reap this benefit, more and more Jamaican fishermen chase fewer and fewer fish, mostly in coastal waters, for a national industry worth about $6.6 billion a year, or merely a sixth of what the foreigners take away.

Critics complain of a lack of Government action to deal significantly with the problem and the absence of a coherent policy to help Jamaicans exploit its lucrative sea resources.

"We allow foreign vessels to come into our EEZ and fish," laments Roderick Francis, owner of the conch fishing outfit, B&D Trawling. "But we don't take advantage of the opportunity."

Francis explains that the foreign ships anchor within Jamaica's EEZ for months at a time, sometimes for a year or more at a stretch, fishing large catch such as tuna and grouper. These big trawlers feed smaller vessels with their catch, which, in turn, resupply the 'mother ships'.

Full story

[wolmersboy]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

That is just criminal! I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere wasn't being paid off to look the other way while these foreign fleets fish in Jamaican waters.

[Blackstar*]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Nigerian leaders 'stole' $380bn
Written By:Jane Nyambune/BBC, Posted: Fri, Oct 20, 2006


More than $380bn has either been stolen or wasted by Nigerian governments since independence in 1960, the chief corruption fighter has said.

Nuhu Ribadu told the BBC that Nigeria has "nothing much" to show for the missing money.

He said the worst period for corruption was the 1980s and '90s, but currently two-thirds of governors are being investigated by Mr Ribadu's agency.

Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil exporter but most people are poor.

The country is regularly ranked as one of the most corrupt by graft watchdog Transparency International.

President Olusegun Obasanjo declared a state of emergency in Ekiti State on Thursday after the governor was found guilty of siphoning state funds into personal bank accounts and receiving kickbacks.

Mr Ribadu said he had come up with his figure of $380bn stolen or wasted since independence "easily" through records kept by the Nigerian central bank and the ministry of finance.

"Basically, this money has gone to waste, nothing much to show for it," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

"Of course, probably part of it will have gone to outside stealing."

Mr Obasanjo's critics say the fight against corruption is being used to victimise his opponents ahead of next year's elections.

Mr Obasanjo is not standing after an attempt to let him seek a third term was defeated.

But Mr Ribadu denied he has a political motive in his fight against corruption.

"When you are doing this kind of work, you will always be accused of one thing or another."

Last month, Vice-President Atiku Abubakar was indicted on charges of corruption, which could stop him from running for office.

He denies allegations he diverted $125m into personal business interests.

Mr Ribadu has led Nigeria's battle against corruption as chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

The EFCC says in the past two years it has recovered more than $5bn and has successfully prosecuted 82 people.

Thanks to evanovitch for spotting this story

[johnnycakes]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Blackstar,
The spoilation and corruption are based on the inordinate love of money; the profit motive: the urge to have more and more then much more than what one needs to live.

I understand your reluctance to link the discussion of what is wrong with black-led countries and the economic form under which they flounder but IMO unless you make that link , you're flailing about without seeing the base cause of African (Third World) problems of corruption and exploitation.

[Archie68]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Joncal, the love of money is even your beloved Cuba. You are focusing on the wrong problem. The love of money is inherent in people. Money is not gold, it is a medium of exchange.

Refocus. Return to the subject. Money is not the problem. Accountibility with money is the problem. Creation of exchange that equals money is the problem.

Return to the issues of producing governance that delivers equal treatment under the laws;provides a security net for the population, teaches children, provides good medical care, produces good roads and educates the young.

You are not making sense otherwise. Those are your strong points.

Socialist like MUgabe, Fidel and Chavez are full of rhetoric and produce no progress.

Dig deep and think of a socialist plan that can deliver above. Please. I want to be a socialist. I want to think socialism can compete against the, "race to the bottom capitalism."

You are a believer Joncal. Produce. Give us a reason to take you seriously and believe too.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Archie,
Again, you make little sense.
You can't see the difference between a poor country like Cuba which provides all the basics for a good quality of life and poor countries under capitalism in which a child dies of starvation every two seconds?

The distinguishing difference between Cuba wherein no child is deprived and the other poor countries where they die because they have no money is a socialist economy and a socialist mind set which says it is immoral for millions to suffer so that some 5% of the population can be rich.

You point out to me which country as poor as Cuba has achieved what Cuba has achieved under socialist thought.

The love of money, the greed and thirst for more money than anyone needs is what drives capitalism and is what principled socialists seek to eliminate from the face of the Earth.

If you can't see the obvious it is because you don't want to.

You have no interest in socialism only an inane desire to make pointless arguments.

Had African nations been allowed to adopt socialism, ENCOURAGED to adopt socialism there would not be the millions of people there dying of starvation, AIDS and other curable diseases and other things that are not killing Cubans under socialism.

The topic is: "Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?"
The answer is that their economies are still in control of the imperial Western countries and they are forced into living under poverty-producing capitalism.

You can ignore the inordinate love of money and the greed and lack of humanitarianism that this sort of thinking leads to and the obvious tie-in this has with the condition of sub-Saharan Africa but that will leave you with no viable or reasonable answer at all won't it ?

"In the world today millions of children sleep (die) in the streets.
Not one is Cuban."

It's quite easy to understand if you're a rational human being.

[Archie68]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

No joncal, it makes no sense. You keep on claiming these problems, I keep asking you to explain how to move on past them.

The problems are simple. Why don't you understand? I ask you relentlessly to disprove the laws of Supply and demand and you flee to the SAME IGNORANT REPEAT NONTHOUGHT NONSENSE every time.

Joncal, I have asked some simple questions. ANSWER THEM. Yes, I am a simple. Yes I need medication. Yes, I am retard.

All that and a bag of banana chips.

Answer.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Archie,
Moving past the problems of deprivation due to the unequal distribution of goods and services involves a transition from capitalism under which tens of millions die each year to socialist economies and an equitable distribution of those things essential to life which is what socialism is all about.

What does supply and demand have to do with the problems of the poor black-led African countries?

[Archie68]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

[ QUOTE ]
Archie,Moving past the problems of deprivation due to the unequal distribution of goods and services involves a transition from capitalism under which tens of millions die each year to socialist economies and an equitable distribution of those things essential to life which is what socialism is all about.

What does supply and demand have to do with the problems of the poor black-led African countries?

[/ QUOTE ]

Do you actually think thought your points before you post?

I will focus on your last sentence in the hope it ends this thread.

They reason these countries are poor is lact of accountibilty and the laws of supply and demand. These countries preach socialism but, the powerful who are in charge, collect the money and send it out of Africa.

That is a gross simplification. Generally accurate. Yet that is what you advocate; more of failure?

I have answered you. Do I need to quote the corruption your socialism produces?

I ask you again. Go find a better system and present it.

[Blackstar*]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

<font color="blue">Nothing really new just felt like posting this article. I guess in the struggle to find basic necessities like food, political protest is the farthest thing from people's minds. </font>

In Congo's Capital, Informal Economy Is Often the Best Opportunity

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A19

KINSHASA, Congo -- On this day, the first sunny day in a while, Omer Waka decided to stake it all on bamboo wall calendars, a calculated gamble in a city of hustles.

Lately, he had hawked soccer balls, brooms, watches and belts, sunglasses, clocks and rainbow feather dusters. But visiting the wholesale market one recent Friday, he had a feeling about the 2007 calendars, one airbrushed with Jesus, the other with the Taj Mahal.

He took his savings, all $8 of it, and bought 10, figuring that he would sell the bunch on the street for $16 and that today he would eat.

"We're pulling into December, and I thought people would like these," said Waka, 31, a trained mechanic who has tried and failed to find work as a mechanic, as a driver, as a guard, as anything in a city where regular paying jobs are almost nonexistent.

And so for 12 years, he has competed in the daily roulette known as the informal economy, an off-the-books netherworld of scrappy enterprise that somehow keeps this city functioning and which includes the vast majority of its 6 million people.

Across Africa, cities are growing rapidly, with 35 percent of the continent's population now living in urban areas, a figure the United Nations expects will surpass 50 percent by 2025.

In Congo, hundreds of thousands fleeing civil war have come to Kinshasa, with one result being a capital filling up with the formally unemployed, who are nonetheless working.

Here, scenes of lethargy are rare; instead, there is the alert energy of people whose daily survival depends on creating something out of nothing, from the jobless teacher selling ices on the corner, to so-called passers whom travelers pay to get through the chaotic airport, to a growing number of street hawkers such as Waka who roam the wide boulevards selling bananas, or knockoff Roberto Cavalli fashions imported from China.

"You can't just cross your hands," said a woman who got a loan from a friend to buy bee pollen pills that she sells from her home. "You'll die of hunger."

To a large extent, it has been this way for decades in Congo, a country with immense mineral wealth whose people are nonetheless ranked among the poorest in the world. The cultlike dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled the country for 32 years, pillaged billions from the government to fund his lifestyle and patronage networks, leaving a state near total collapse and a nation of people who essentially had to fend for themselves.

Two civil wars that followed only worsened the situation, and thus in Kinshasa, urbanization has meant heaping more people on top of an already untenable situation.

For a few, there is still the marbled, if slightly decaying Grand Hotel left over from the Mobutu days, where Congolese and European businessmen do deals under the palms. Down a decrepit road behind wrought-iron gates is the gilded compound of the former minister of mines, who receives visitors on overstuffed couches and, for ambience, plays the same Sade song all day, on repeat.

For the vast majority, however, day-to-day life exists on the margins, without access to credit, without banks, without insurance, beyond any government regulation or benefit, beyond even any physical structure.

In Kinshasa, if you have a chair, some scissors and the sprawl of a mango tree, you have a barbershop.

One recent Friday, the street hawkers began their daily orbit around the city at dawn, selling bags of water, toothpicks and orange blossom air fresheners. Waka was among them, and by midmorning he had sold a couple of Taj Mahals, but others were not so lucky.

Bahati Gachabu was still dangling the blue Kenneth Cole button-down he had spent an hour selecting at the market that morning. Siku Chendesa was still waving two suits like signal flags to passersby, who were mostly other street hawkers.

"I've been with these suits for four days now," he said, walking on past a man selling sunglasses and another selling two packs of cigarettes and a bottle of Chanel.

While cheap goods from China have benefited a handful of Congolese importers, they have mostly filled the city with frying pans and fake Thierry Mugler underwear that vendors are rarely able to sell.

Chendesa passed near a Cobil gas station, where three men in white plastic chairs appeared to be doing nothing but were actually working the corner as money-changers.

They sat under an umbrella they had made from a flour sack, next to a sign they had made from a scrap of wood, amid hundreds of white plastic chairs and flour sack umbrellas belonging to people selling apples, popcorn, motor oil, fish.

In their own way, the three had a collective of sorts.

"Sometimes, there are people among us here who haven't eaten," said Kasiala, who started his business with a $25 loan from a relative. "So when we come together, we try to help the one who didn't have food that day and things like that."

Some days, Kasiala said, he could make $5, which paid for food for himself and his pregnant wife, and transportation, with perhaps $1 left for doctor visits. He lives with his parents, because paying rent is unfathomable.

"We're here 365 days a year," Kasiala said. "If you stay home, you'll starve."

The three sat there all day in the sun, in the rain and into the night, when they waited some more.

With plenty of time between customers, they spent hours discussing politics and news. Kasiala studied philosophy at college, preferring Socrates "because he made fun of himself," he said. His friend Jimmy Mandu studied international relations.

"I think maybe I'll finish school and become a diplomat, and tie our country with others," Mandu said, imagining a tentative future.

Kasiala also considered his work temporary, perhaps a trick of the mind, he granted, considering he had been on the corner four years now.

In a white plastic chair next to him, Roger Manga was selling motor oil out of soda bottles, as he has for 26 of his 45 years on Earth.

"Really, if I'm here, it's to avoid stealing people's stuff," he said.

None of the men had tried signing up with the newly created Office of National Employment a couple of miles away, housed in a stucco building called Le Royal that would be considered abandoned except that "O.N.E.M," the office's acronym, is freshly scrawled on a door.

In theory, the office is supposed to register all the unemployed in Congo and match them with companies that have jobs.

In reality, a couple dozen people came at their appointed time one recent morning, only to be turned away because none of the office's employees showed up for work.

It was raining, and people waited under a slender eave -- an unemployed economist, an unemployed farmer, an unemployed teacher, an unemployed engineer and unemployed Roger Malumba, who finished college with an admiration for the theories of the political theorist Montesquieu.

"He speaks of the counterweight theory," Malumba said. "And in a country like ours, that's interesting."

He had hoped to work for a good-government group but could not find a job that paid. He tried Congolese Bank of Credit, Bravo Air, Celtel, Vodacom and starting his own political Web site. But all he got was 10 years older.

"Can you imagine, 32 years old and I'm still under my parents' roof?" Malumba said. "As an intellectual, it's very bothering. My parents sacrificed so much so I could help them. But can you imagine not having a job in all these years? It's revolting."

It was why Omer Waka took his chances with bamboo calendars, and the money-changers sat on their corner, watching junker cars and the occasional Mercedes pass by. Sometimes, sitting there, they plotted various means of escaping the country that seems to them a jungle prison.

"All of us here would like to change nationality," said Kasiala, who imagines crossing into Angola someday or making his way to Paris, if he can save enough money. "Mainly, that's my everyday thinking, because I can't make it here."

-------------------------------------------------------------

Kabila Promises New Era for Congo
Nation Inaugurates First Freely Elected Leader Since

By Eddy Isango
Associated Press
Thursday, December 7, 2006; A23

KINSHASA, Congo, Dec. 6 -- After decades of dictatorship and wars, Congo on Wednesday swore in its first freely elected president since 1960, installing Joseph Kabila, the son of a rebel leader, who promised a new era of order and better days ahead.

"This moment marks the beginning of a new era that must bring well-being and development to Congo's people," Kabila said at his inauguration ceremony outside the presidential palace. "I see a Congo where the people are always able to work."

Kabila, declared the winner of an October presidential runoff vote, took his oath after a series of prayers from different faiths -- including Islam, Christianity and the indigenous Kimbanguist Church. Thousands of onlookers shaded themselves from the sun under umbrellas in the national colors of blue, red and yellow.

Though he has been accused of continuing a trend of corruption and ignoring abuses by his army, Kabila, 35, is widely praised for ushering in a peace plan that ended the 1998-2002 wars that drew in the armies of at least six countries and for creating a unity government that organized the central African country's first multiparty elections in more than four decades.

Congo, rich in cobalt, diamonds, copper, gold and other minerals, gained independence from Belgium in 1960 and was ruled for 32 years by Mobutu Sese Seko, a dictator who changed the country's name to Zaire and plundered its wealth, pocketing billions. Kabila's father helped depose Mobutu, but was assassinated by his bodyguards in 2001. The younger Kabila then took power.

A series of conflicts and street clashes have marred the transition and the election -- often with army units battling each other. In the east, troops loyal to a renegade general have fought the army in recent days.

The 17,500 U.N. peacekeeping troops in Congo have been called upon repeatedly to keep the peace, but the violence has never fully derailed the process started four years ago.

Kabila won the runoff with 58 percent of the vote, compared with about 42 percent for his rival, vice president and former rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba.

Bemba had contested the results but said he would resign himself to political opposition after his court challenge failed. He was not present at Wednesday's ceremony. In his speech, Kabila endorsed the right of political opponents to organize under Congo's constitution.

[Archie68]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Will this end the hell called Congo? I don't know. But I hope this will lead to the end of the relentless destruction, oppression, murder and rape of that country.

[wolmersboy]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

One can only hope......

[wolmersboy]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

Despite the overwhelming odds against them, these people still try to make something out of nothing. I am full of admiration for their efforts and I pray that their new government will begin to support them.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

"Do you actually think thought your points before you post? "

Yes Archie I think thought a lot about my posts before I post them. Not only that but unlike you, I proofread them before I post them so I don't appear illiterate.

"I will focus on your last sentence in the hope it ends this thread."

You'd need some functional mental capacity (heretofore lacking) in order to focus.

"They reason these countries are poor is lact of accountibilty and the laws of supply and demand. These countries preach socialism but, the powerful who are in charge, collect the money and send it out of Africa. "

"That is a gross simplification. Generally accurate. Yet that is what you advocate; more of failure?"

"I have answered you. Do I need to quote the corruption your socialism produces?"

Yes quote the corruption that "my" socialism produces in sub-Saharan Africa.

"I ask you again. Go find a better system and present it.

[/ QUOTE ]"

Archie, Socialism works in Third World Cuba and it can also work in Third World Africa just as well.

Archie,
Please point out a single sub-Saharan African country with a socialist economy. Don't evade the question with inanities.
Name ONE.

[Archie68]

Re: Why Are Black-Led Countries Doing So Badly?

You return to Fidel love at every turn. When he dies, will you die too? Your love is that deep.

Joncal, I am going to ask an old question. One you flee from everytime.

If Cuba's system provides Socialism's ideal, why does Cuba and its friend cry about the US embargo. Why cry that you do not have an economic relationshion with the economic imperialists?

Are you insane. Yes, I do not think. What do expect of an irrational, uneducated child?

And yes, you supported Cuba's adventurism in Africa. You support Chavez . He supports Mugabe. So does your friend Galloway. Stop your pathetic argument.

ASk the moderator to dig out when you stated support for Chavez, Mugabe and Galloway.

FAce it, you have no point. Go support some sociopath somewhere.