The legacy of slavery resounds down the ages, and the world has yet to
overcome racism. The consequences of slavery had not ended with
emancipation, but continued to this day. While some forms of slavery may
have been abolished, others have emerged to blight the world, including
human trafficking and forced and bonded labour. For over 400 years,
more than 15 million men, women and children were the victims of the
transatlantic slave trade, one of the darkest chapters in human history.
Slavery is, nevertheless, far from being just a chapter of the past—it
still there, with estimated 21 million victims of forced labour and
extreme exploitation around the world–nearly the equivalent to of the
combined population of Scandinavian countries. Trafficking can have
numerous other forms including: victims compelled to act as beggars,
forced into sham marriages, benefit fraud, pornography production, organ
removal, among others. According to the UN, victims of trafficking are
found in 106 of 193 countries. Many of these are in conflict areas,
where the crimes are not prosecuted. Women and children are among the
main victims. 79 per cent of all detected trafficking victims are women
and children. In fact, millions of women and girls are sold for sexual
exploitation and slavery.
Human Rights First informs that human trafficking earns profits of
roughly 150 billion dollars a year for traffickers. The following is a
breakdown of profits, by sector:
– 99 billion dollars from commercial sexual exploitation
– 34 billion dollars in construction, manufacturing, mining and utilities
– 9 billion dollars in agriculture, including forestry and fishing
– 8 billion dollars is saved annually by private households that employ domestic workers under conditions of forced labour
While only 22 per cent of victims are trafficked for sex, sexual
exploitation earns 66 per cent of the global profits of human
trafficking, reminds Human Rights First. The average annual profits
generated by each woman in forced sexual servitude ($100,000) is
estimated to be six times more than the average profits generated by
each trafficking victim worldwide ($21,800). Sexual exploitation can
yield a return on investment ranging from 100 per cent to 1,000 per
cent, while an enslaved labourer can produce more than 50 per cent
profit even in less profitable markets (e.g., agricultural labour in
India).
However, the Socialist Party highlights another form of slavery and
strives for the emancipation of wage-slaves. Under chattel-slavery the
slave was bought and sold and became the property of the buyer. Under
the system of wage-slavery, to which workers of all races in all
capitalist countries are subjected at present, the labour-power of the
individual worker is bought, a wage is paid to the worker by the
employer, and the employer only takes an interest in the welfare of his
workers in so far as it helps him to make profits out of them. Under
chattel-slavery the slave was oppressed and exploited by the slave
master and slave rebellions took place time and again led by the
instinctive surge to freedom. The wage-slaves — workers of today — are
exploited and oppressed by the capitalist employers. Under the system of
wage-slavery workers are constantly struggling for better conditions
and for the abolishment of capitalist slavery in all countries. Under
the old chattel slavery system, overseers lashed the slaves to their
tasks. When wage slavery came into existence the slave master was still
there, in the shape of the management's boss, but the lash had become an
invisible one, the threat of the sack and the prospect of unemployment.
We’re a new kind of slave. The bosses don’t own our bodies any more,
they just own our jobs. The master class live off our sweat and toil.
Alan Johnstone
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Nigeria's water crisis
Lagos, Nigeria, is surrounded by an abundance of water, but millions
of inhabitants in Africa’s most populous city can’t drink it. The state
is not providing water and they’re also not allowing people to fend for
themselves to survive.
Water shortages, fueled in part by recurrent drought and violence, has
been decimating Nigeria for years. The charity WaterAid has said the
water crisis had killed more people across the country than the militant
group Boko Haram. While the terrorist group had claimed more than 4,000
lives in 2014, the nonprofit said a lack
of running water had killed more than 70,000. Water has long been a source of tension in Lagos, it added.
The coastal city that’s bordered by a lagoon is in the throes of a water
crisis. Only1 in 10 people have access to water that the state utility
provides. The rest — some 19 million residents — rely on informal water
sources, eitherdrilling their own boreholes to drink from or fetching
water from lakes or rivers. Those that can afford it pay exorbitant
amounts to local “mai ruwa,” or water vendors, who peddle their wares in
often-unsanitary jerry cans, or bottles and cellophane sachets.
Yet, activists say, the Lagos House of Assembly passed legislation last
month that could threaten even this last-resort source of drinking water
— an imperfect, but critical lifeline for most Lagosians.
Opponents of the Lagos Environment Bill say politicians did not follow
due legislative process before it was signed into law on March 1 ― and
its final language has still not been made available to the public two
weeks after the fact. It could criminalize the private extraction of
water, including the drilling of boreholes and purchasing water from
private sellers, activists warn.
“One of our rights as citizens is to live, to have good water to drink,
good environment,” said Agnes Sessi, president of the African Women
Water, Hygiene and Sanitation Network, this month in reaction to the new
law. “If government has failed to provide water for us, they do not
have the right to take away our efforts to
provide for ourselves. Do they want us to die?” the United Nations
issued a strong-worded statement last month condemning the water bill.
“When the State fails to provide adequate access to drinking water, no
one should be criminalized or fined for fetching water from lakes,
rivers, or any other natural sources,” said Léo Heller, U.N. special
rapporteur on the human rights to water and sanitation, on Feb. 27. “The
government is taking a step too far by imposing fines of
the equivalent of $310 on ordinary individuals fetching water for survival, when the minimum wage stands at approximately $60.”
As the metropolis ballooned in size over recent decades, growing from an
estimated 1.4 million people in 1970 to more than 21 million today,
Lagos’ public water system has struggled to keep pace. Pipes, many of
them decades old, have rotted through and taps now often run dry.
The two major water treatment plants in the city have fallen into
disrepair; workers there have complained of non-functioning pumps, poor
power supply and production rates well under capacity. And that only
applies to the 10 percent of households in the city that actually
receive piped water from the state. For everyone else, finding any means
to attain water — unsanitary or not — is an everyday battle.
In Lagos, 60 percent of Nigerians earn less than $1 a day, yet the
country is now home to almost 16,000 millionaires, most of them in
Lagos. And the discrepancy is acutely felt when it comes to water,
according to Bragg.
Some poorer communities don’t have access to clean water themselves but
have pipes running over-ground through their neighborhoods to the more
wealthy ones. “The contrast is stark,” he said. “They can’t get water,
but there’s water literally passing right by them.”
Buying water from private vendors is a common practice and Lagos
residents have called the service a “saving grace,” but it can be
inaccessible for the poorest Lagosians. The average family may needs to
buy seven or eight jerry cans of water daily, which could cost $50 or
more a month, according to a 2016 report from the Environmental Rights
Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria. In Nigeria, the average middle
class family income is between $230 and $300 monthly.
The more severe the water shortage, the brisker the business for some
water sellers. Abubakar Audu, a long-time mai ruwa, told local paper Eko
Trust last year that he sets his price “depending on how desperate the
customer is” and whether or not there’s light (blackouts are an everyday
occurrence in the city).
With proper sanitation practically non-existent across Lagos and most
residents drinking water from untreated and unreliable sources, the
city’s water problems have had a dire impact on public health.
Water-borne diseases including cholera, dysentery, as well as typhoid
and malaria fever, are a concern. In February last year, 25
children under the age of 6 died in one Lagos community after drinking pathogen-infected water.
Long-term exposure to toxins is also a concern. A 2012 investigation
found high concentrations of heavy metals like lead and cadmium at
levels far above World Health Organization standards in borehole water
samples extracted in Lagos.
The city’s government has precipitated the water crisis in Lagos by years of inaction, according to activists.
For decades, the state has “neglected to invest into the
infrastructure,” said Corporate Accountability International’s Bragg.
Instead, it has chosen to prioritize the possible privatization of
Lagos’ water utility through public-private partnerships — a plan that
has repeatedly failed, he added.
“Lagos is very key to the African continent; it is the heart of
Nigeria,” he said. “If water privatization is successful in Lagos, it
could spread across Nigeria and across Africa. Quality will go down,
sanitation will be impacted and the poorest of the poor will not be able
to get adequate water.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lagos-water-crisis-bill-nigeria_us_58c8b63ce4b01c029d7758b7?
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Africa's New Debts
Mozambique is the first major African nation in recent times to become unable to meet obligations to international creditors. In
2012, Mozambique's obligations to its creditors amounted to 40 percent
of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), they now total 130 percent. Banks and
investment funds were keen to lend Mozambique money believing it would
be safe because the country possesses huge reserves of coal and natural
gas. Those investors have been left empty-handed.
A decade after the last major debt write-down, African states are again in difficulties.
The German NGO
Erlassjahr.de (Jubilee Germany), which campaigns for debt relief, has
identified as many as 40 African countries which are showing signs of
heavy indebtedness.
"This is not surprising because today's economic indicators are telling a
story very similar to the situation in the late 1970s and early 1980s
which led to the Third World debt crisis,"
said Jürgen Kaiser, political coordinator at Jubilee Germany. In the wealthy industrialized countries, interest
rates are very low, but in Africa
investors can fetch returns of between seven and 15 percent. This leads to large capital flows from the North to the South."
"The low
interest rates encourage countries to take out big loans which they then
have difficulty paying back," Kaiser said. The situation becomes
particularly precarious when commodity prices fall. This leads to a
subsequent decline in tax revenue in economies that are dependent on
oil, natural gas, coal or other raw materials.
This latest
debt crisis may come as a surprise to some people because numerous
developing countries had a large share of their debts written down under
the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. However,
commentators who were convinced at the time that that this initiative
launched by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the G-8
group of leading industrialized nations, including Germany, would solve
the developing nations' debts problems turned out to be wrong.
"Mozambique is a
very dramatic case. It is the first country to cease repayments in such
an abrupt significant manner since HIPC debt relief," said Jürgen
Kaiser. "But countries such as Gambia or Ghana, which also have an
abundance of natural resources, are in a very critical situation as
well. Senegal, which does not have much in the way of natural resoures,
is also in difficulties once again," he added. On analyzing World Bank
data of African nations' indebtedness with foreign countries, it quickly
becomes apparent that a large number of African economies have
recently acquired dramatic levels of new debt. Between 2005 and 2015 -
the most recent year for which figure are available - Angola, Ghana,
Kenya and South Africa have witnessed a threefold increase in their debt
levels. Smaller countries such as Cape Verde also borrowed fresh
capital during this time frame.
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Fragile China
Economist Gan Li and his researchers at Chengdu’s Southwestern
University of Finance and Economics showed that China’s Gini
coefficient, a measure of income inequality, had reached 0.61, well
above the 0.4 level widely considered destabilizing by economists.
The top 1 percent held more than one-quarter of China’s wealth, while 430 million Chinese struggled day-to-day.
Gan’s research on China’s housing sector figures that 70 percent of
total household wealth is made up of the value of apartments. About 50
million already-sold units sit empty, much more than some investment
banks had estimated. (The government doesn’t release national data on
empty apartments.) China has a vacancy rate of 18 percent, compared with
13 percent in the U.S., Gan says.
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