Home

 

  Modern Slavery

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 

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

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?

 

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

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.

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

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.

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