NIGERIA: Beyond Boko Haram, Civilians Are Suffering

In this informal camp in Maiduguri, north-east Nigeria, nearly 2,000 people live in tiny makeshift shelters made up of plastic and bed sheets. Their living conditions are well below international humanitarian standards, but they have nowhere else to go. None of the children in this camp attend school. Photo: Hajer Naili/NRC

BY HAJER NAILI

Boko Haram has dominated the international media coverage of Nigeria in recent years. But beyond the high-profile attacks and kidnappings, civilians are suffering in their millions. NRC media adviser Hajer Naili meets some of the families affected by the ongoing humanitarian crisis and tells their stories of hunger, overcrowded camps and emotional trauma.

Suweba, a mother of five, gave birth to a daughter just 13 days after arriving at a makeshift camp in Maiduguri, in north-east Nigeria. Her baby girl is sleeping on the piece of fabric and plastic that serves as a floor. She lies next to plastic bags and cooking pots, the sole belongings of the family.

“I still have not eaten today. We eat either in the morning or in the evening, depending on where there will be food,” says Suweba wearily. To be able to eat at least once a day, she has to send two of her children out to beg so they can buy food.

Suweba’s baby was about three weeks old when we met. It was heart-wrenching to realise that her first days in this world were spent in a tiny tent, deprived of comfort, and breastfed by a mother who barely eats enough to produce milk.

Suweba is one of about 1.7 million people suffering from food insecurity in north-east Nigeria, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Ten years of terror
The Boko Haram-led insurgency in north-east Nigeria will mark its ten-year anniversary in July 2019. However, most of us heard about it for the first time in April 2014 following the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in the town of Chibok. This event drew international attention and resulted in the #BringBackOurGirls movement.

Yet, for five years prior to this, women, men and children had been suffering from attacks and the tyranny of an armed group, without any international alarms being raised.

International attention from political leaders and the media often takes place in a selective fashion – either to serve a political agenda or to shape a narrative that sells. Humanitarian stories, especially those in Africa, rarely catch the interest of news editors, much to the frustration of freelance journalists who are keen to spread the word.

The suffering in Nigeria tends only to attract international attention when members of Boko Haram launch spectacular attacks or on special occasions such as the recent presidential elections. Yet, the mere fact that more than 7 million people – twice the population of Berlin – still need humanitarian assistance should be enough to warrant the world’s attention. Stories like Suweba’s have been overlooked for too long.

Squeezed into five square metres

When we met, Suweba was living in a makeshift tent no more than five square metres in size, made out of plastic and bed sheets. This tiny space served as a living, cooking and resting place for her and her five children.

Currently, more than 600,000 people are staying in highly congested displacement camps across north-east Nigeria, according to recent Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) estimates. Of these, 160,000 have as little as five square metres per person to live in. This is well below the international humanitarian standard for displacement camps of 45 square metres of usable surface area per person.

When displaced people are forced to live on top of each other because of a lack of available land, the risks of disease, fire, community tensions, and domestic and sexual violence increase. As thousands of people continue to be displaced, relieving overcrowding should be a high priority for the government and the international community.

Fire in camp: families left to fend for themselves

The following week, while driving, my colleagues and I witnessed a fire at a displacement site in the town of Tungunshe. Women and children were trying to save everything they could from their straw-made shelters, while men, young and old, were fighting the flames with water-filled pots and sand.

A tiny spark from a cooking stove had set ablaze several tents, burning to the ground the temporary homes of several dozen displaced families. More distressing than seeing the shelters being destroyed was the sight of residents trying to put out the fire by themselves because no help would come.

In fact, no-one came to help these families all day. A few hours after the fire, large swathes of grey and black ashes covered the soil – a painful reminder of what used to be a refuge for over 50 displaced families.

Emotional trauma: the hidden impact of displacement

Aisha* was carrying her little brother and standing next to a half-built hut that served as a shelter for the whole family. Her mother was not around so I waited for her to come so I could ask permission to use her daughter’s photograph and hear their story.

While waiting, I chatted with the girl. After a few minutes of exchange, she burst into tears and walked away. I felt terrible when I saw the fear and panic on Aisha’s face. When her mother came, I explained what had happened. The mother told me that the whole family had been displaced and that the violence they had witnessed as well as their life of displacement had been traumatic experiences.

Children and adults who live in the middle of a prolonged conflict are damaged both emotionally and psychologically. Some are affected for a limited period of time, others for the rest of their lives.

Conflicts and wars do not just result in the loss of lives or the destruction of buildings and infrastructures. They result, more often than reported, in the slow destruction of human beings from inside – as women, men and children carry within themselves fear, anxiety and painful memories.

Their stories must be told

Over the last ten years, several million people in north-east Nigeria have seen their lives shattered, their livelihoods destroyed, their freedom of movement taken away and their future hopes dashed.

Many of them have been shunned, unwanted by their own communities because they had the misfortune to live in an area controlled by Boko Haram.

It is time to bring the world’s attention to the plight of these people. Their stories must be told, independently of any insurgency or counter-insurgency news. And their stories must be heard with compassion and understanding, at both a political and a personal level. It is too easy to forget about the millions of people in need when we don’t know them and don’t know their stories.

SOURCE: NORWEGIAN REFUGEE COUNCIL

Mueller To Testify Publicly Before House Committees July 17

The letter from House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff to special counsel Robert Mueller that was sent with subpoenas to compel Mueller's testimony to the committees on July 17, is photographed in Washington, Tuesday, June 25, 2019. Mueller has agreed to testify publicly before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees after both panels issued subpoenas to him Tuesday evening. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

BY MARY CLARE JALONICK, ERIC TUCKER AND LISA MASCARO

WASHINGTON (AP) — Special counsel Robert Mueller has agreed to testify publicly before Congress on July 17 after Democrats issued subpoenas to compel him to appear, the chairmen of two House committees announced Tuesday.

Mueller’s unusual back-to-back testimony in front of the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees is likely to be the most highly anticipated congressional hearing in years, particularly given Mueller’s resolute silence throughout his two-year investigation into Russian contacts with President Donald Trump’s campaign. Mueller never responded to angry, public attacks from Trump, nor did he ever personally join his prosecutors in court or make announcements of criminal charges from the team.

His sole public statement came from the Justice Department podium last month as he announced his departure, when he sought to explain his decision to not indict Trump or to accuse him of criminal conduct. He also put lawmakers on notice that he did not ever intend to say more than what he put in the 448-page report.

“We chose those words carefully and the work speaks for itself,” Mueller said May 29. “I would not provide information beyond what is already public in any appearance before Congress.”

Those remarks did little to settle the demands for his testimony. The two committees continued negotiations that had already been going on for weeks, saying they still wanted to hear from Mueller no matter how reluctant he was.

“When you accept the role of special counsel in one of the most significant investigations in modern history you’re going to have to expect that you’re going to be asked to come and testify before Congress,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told reporters shortly after the announcement.

Trump himself simply tweeted, “Presidential Harassment!”

In the report issued in April, Mueller concluded there was not enough evidence to establish a conspiracy between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, which was the original question that started the investigation. But he also said he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction of justice. The report examined several episodes in which Trump attempted to influence the investigation.

Democrats say it is now the job of Congress to assess the report’s findings. Lawmakers are likely to confront Mueller on why he did not come to a firm conclusion on obstruction of justice. They are also likely to seek his reaction to a drumbeat of incessant criticism from the president and ask for his personal opinion about whether Trump would have been charged were he not the commander-in-chief.

Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler said they issued the subpoenas Tuesday, and Mueller agreed to testify pursuant to those subpoenas. In a letter to Mueller accompanying the subpoenas, the committee chairmen said “the American public deserves to hear directly from you about your investigation and conclusions.”

Schiff said there will be two hearings “back to back,” one for each committee, and they will also meet with Mueller’s staff in closed session afterward.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Republicans have criticized Democrats for their continuing investigations of the president. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., questioned why they would still want to hear from Mueller after the lengthy report was issued. “He said he didn’t want to talk to us anymore, didn’t he?”

But Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the top Republican on the Judiciary panel, has said he has no objections to Mueller’s testimony.

“May this testimony bring to House Democrats the closure that the rest of America has enjoyed for months, and may it enable them to return to the business of legislating,” Collins said.

____

Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

Growing Through Education In Nigeria

Image: Chris Martin/Newscom via IMF

BY VIVIAN MALTA, MONIQUE NEWIAK
Our chart of the week, drawn from the IMF’s 2019 economic health check for Nigeria, highlights substantial inequality in access to education between girls and boys, and between rich and poor.

It is widely accepted that addressing educational gaps results in rapid and large benefits for children, their families, communities, and the country more broadly.

Limited schooling for girls

According to a survey conducted by the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics, a girl born into a Nigerian family in the poorest fifth of society spends about 1 year in school—approximately a third of the already limited schooling enjoyed by, say, her brother.

Access to education improves as a family gets richer, but gender inequality in education is entrenched and barely disappears for the richest 20 percent of households.

We believe that closing gender gaps in education across all income groups could boost GDP by 5 percent in one generation. It would lower income inequality by 2¼ points as measured by the Gini coefficient—a reduction that many countries strive to achieve over decades.

Spending beyond education

The government and development partners all recognize that more resources and structural changes are needed to improve access to education and make it more equitable.

Adequate funding for teachers and schools can help raise the quality of education. But spending beyond the classroom can also yield educational benefits. For example, investments in safe access to water and sanitation facilities will improve health and therefore learning opportunities for all kids, while giving an extra boost to school attendance. Mobilizing revenue through, for instance, comprehensive VAT reform and improved tax administration will be critical to fund these efforts.

Other reforms require few additional resources and are important in shaping priorities. Passing into law the Gender and Equal Opportunities Billand implementing a Children’s Rights Act are examples of legal changes that would put equality of opportunity on the statute books—a move which would have a positive impact for generations to come.

SOURCE: IMF

Report: Hackers Using Telecoms Like 'Global Spy System'

Cellular site equipment in London, Tuesday, June 25, 2019. According to Boston-based Cybereason, a group of state-backed hackers has been burrowing into all kinds of telecommunications companies in order to spy on high-profile targets across the world, the U.S. cybersecurity firm said in a report published Tuesday June 25, 2019.(AP Photo/Raphael Satter)

BY RAPHAEL SATTER

LONDON (AP) — An ambitious group of state-backed hackers has been burrowing into telecommunications companies in order to spy on high-profile targets across the world, a U.S. cybersecurity firm said in a report published Tuesday.

Boston-based Cybereason said the tactic gave hackers sweeping access to VIPs’ call records, location data and device information — effectively turning the targets’ cellular providers against them.

Cybereason Chief Executive Lior Div said that because customers weren’t directly targeted, they might never discover their every movement was being monitored by a hostile power.

The hackers had turned the affected telecoms into “a global surveillance system,” Div said in a telephone interview ahead of the report’s launch.

“Those individuals don’t know they were hacked — because they weren’t.”

Div, who is presenting his findings at the Cyber Week conference in Tel Aviv, provided scant details about who was targeted in the hack, saying that Cybereason had been called in to help an unidentified cellular provider last year and discovered that the hackers had broken into the firm’s billing server, where call records are logged.

The hackers were using their access to extract the call data of “around 20” customers, Div said.

Who those people were he declined to say, describing them as mainly coming from the world of politics and the military. He said the information was so sensitive he would not provide even the vaguest idea of where they or the telecom were located.

“I’m not even going to share the continent,” he said.

Cybereason said the compromise of its customer eventually led it to about 10 other firms that had been hit in a similar way, with hackers stealing data in 100 gigabyte chunks. Div said that, in some cases, the hackers appeared to be tracking non-phone devices, such as cars or smartwatches.

The GSMA, which represents mobile operators worldwide, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Who might be behind such hacking campaigns is often a fraught question in a world full of digital false flags. Cybereason said that all the signs pointed to APT10 — the nickname often applied to a notorious China-linked cyberespionage group.

But Div said the clues they found were so obvious he and his team sometimes wondered whether they might have been left on purpose.

“I thought: ‘Hey, just a second, maybe it’s somebody who wants to blame APT10,’” he said.

Chinese authorities have routinely denied responsibility for hacking operations. The Chinese Embassy in London did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Div said that it was unclear whether the ultimate targets of the espionage operation were warned, saying Cybereason had left it to the telecom firms to notify their customers. Div added that he had been in touch with “a handful” of law enforcement agency about the matter, although he did not say which ones.

The FBI in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

US Gov't Moves Migrant Kids After AP Exposes Bad Treatment

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

This June 20, 2019, file frame from video shows the entrance of a Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has told a Texas congresswoman Monday, June 24, that the agency is quickly removing children from the patrol station following reports that children locked inside were in a perilous situation. (AP Photo/Cedar Attanasio, File)

BY MARTHA MENDOZA, GARANCE BURKE

The U.S. government has removed most children from a remote Border Patrol station in Texas near the border with Mexico following reports that more than 300 children were detained there and caring for each other with inadequate food, water and sanitation.

Only about 30 children remained at the station outside El Paso on Monday, Rep. Veronica Escobar said after her office was briefed on the situation by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official.

Most of the infants, toddlers and teens who were held at the Border Patrol station in Clint, Texas, were scheduled to be transferred by Tuesday to shelters and other facilities run by a separate federal agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement said.

Attorneys involved in monitoring care for migrant children who visited Clint last week said older children were trying to take care of toddlers, The Associated Press reported Thursday. They described a 4-year-old with matted hair who had gone without a shower for days, and hungry, inconsolable children struggling to soothe one another. Some had been locked for three weeks inside the facility, where 15 children were sick with the flu and another 10 were in medical quarantine.

“How is it possible that you both were unaware of the inhumane conditions for children, especially tender-age children at the Clint Station?” Escobar, a Democrat, said in a letter sent Friday to U.S. Customs and Border Protection acting commissioner John Sanders and U.S. Border Patrol chief Carla Provost.

Escobar asked to be informed by the end of this week what steps the officials are taking to end what she called “these humanitarian abuses.”

Lawmakers from both parties decried the situation last week.

Border Patrol officials have not responded to AP’s questions about the conditions at the Clint facility, but emailed a statement Monday that said: “Our short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis.”

Although it’s unclear where all the children held at Clint were moved, Escobar said some were sent to another facility on the north side of El Paso called Border Patrol Station 1. Escobar said it’s a temporary site with roll-out mattresses, showers, medical facilities and air conditioning.

But Clara Long, an attorney who interviewed children at Border Patrol Station 1 last week, said conditions were not necessarily better there.

“One boy I spoke with said his family didn’t get mattresses or blankets for the first two nights, and he and his mom came down with a fever,” said Long, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch. “He said there were no toothbrushes, and it was very, very cold.”


Vice President Mike Pence, asked about the unsafe, unsanitary conditions for the children on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, said “it’s totally unacceptable” and added that he hopes Congress will allocate more resources to border security.

Long and a group of lawyers inspected the facilities because they are involved in the Flores settlement, a Clinton-era legal agreement that governs detention conditions for migrant children and families. The lawyers negotiated access to the Clint facility with officials and say Border Patrol knew the dates of their visit three weeks in advance.

Many children interviewed had arrived alone at the U.S.-Mexico border, but some had been separated from their parents or other adult caregivers including aunts and uncles, the attorneys said.

Government facilities are overcrowded and five immigrant children have died since late last year after being detained by Customs and Border Protection. Two weeks ago, a teenage mother with a premature baby was found in a Border Patrol processing center in McAllen, Texas after being held for nine days by the government.

Government rules call for children to be held by the Border Patrol in their short-term stations for no longer than 72 hours before they are transferred to the custody of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which houses migrant youth in facilities around the country through its Office of Refugee Resettlement while authorities determine if they can be released to relatives or family friends.

Customs and Border Protection referred AP’s questions about the Clint Facility to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which said Monday that 249 children previously held in Clint would be moved to the agency’s network of shelters and other facilities by Tuesday.

″(Unaccompanied children) are waiting too long in CBP facilities that are not designed to care for children,” ORR spokeswoman Evelyn Stauffer said. “These children should now all be in HHS care as of Tuesday.”

This story has been corrected to show Pence was on “Face the Nation,” not “Meet the Press.”

Green New Deals

Image via Eurasia Review

BY HOWARD RICHARDS
On February 7, 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York introduced in the United States House of Representatives a Resolution: Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal. It demanded benefits Americans in the twenty first century lack that North West Europeans enjoyed back in the 1960s, and Americans seemed to be on track toward getting during the Roosevelt years. It demanded high wages, paid vacations, increasing life expectancy and universal access to high quality health care. Her Green New Deal put special emphasis on cleaning up pollution and reversing global warming. It called for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Recently two prominent European movements, T-DEM chaired by Thomas Piketty and DiEM25 chaired by Yanis Varoufakis, have made detailed proposals that are also called Green New Deals. One of the authors of DiEM25, Ulf Clerwall, described it as:

‘…basically an investment boom … And yes, the European Deal will be debt-financed, but by a debt to ourselves and that will rapidly pay back with a high rate of return in financial, economic, social and environmental terms.’

The Green New Deal of the Piketty group — similar, but more tax-financed– describes itself as follows:

‘This Budget, if the European Assembly so desires, will be financed by four major European taxes, the tangible markers of this European solidarity. These will apply to the profits of major firms, the top incomes (over 200,000 Euros per annum), the highest wealth owners (over 1 million Euros) and the carbon emissions (with a minimum price of 30 Euros per tonne). If it is fixed at 4% of GDP, as we propose, this budget could finance research, training and the European universities, an ambitious investment programme to transform our model of economic growth, the financing of the reception and integration of migrants and the support of those involved in operating the transformation.'

‘Green New Deal’ has become a rallying cry around the world. Just this month, Neil Coleman, Co-Director of the Institute of Economic Justice of South Africa, unveiled a platform called Let’s Build a New Economy for the Many not Just the Few. Coleman writes: ‘A Green New Deal. The global climate crisis and the challenges in energy are also acute in South Africa. Just as progressive forces in the US and the UK are proposing the need for a Green New Deal, which addresses climate challenges and ensures a just transition to new forms of energy and technology for workers and communities, South Africa urgently needs to have a similar discussion about strategies to manage the transition….’

In the South African version Pillar I is: A macro-economic stimulus and investment package. Macro-economic stimulus is for the Institute of Economic Justice priority Number One, and the prerequisite of everything else. This is so even though its authors doubt out loud whether the South African government has enough borrowing capacity left to raise funds for a stimulus of the size needed. Economic stimulus and investment being Pillar I, in its South African version The Green New Deal comes in as part 4 of Pillar III.

As Ulf Clerwall, one of its authors, writes in so many words regarding DiEM25, and as advocates of the other Green New Deals have also made clear, Green New Deals are about, to use other common phrases, ‘jump-starting’ or ‘pump-priming.’ For Varoufakis, DiEM25 is ‘stabilising.’ What appears to have been the first Green New Deal Group, one in the UK in 2008, was also about public provision of low-cost capital for massive investment designed to create green jobs.

In sum, Green New Deals remain mainly within the same economic common-sense framework where the world’s governments remained when they tried to cope with the crisis of 2008. It is the framework of the economy we already have, where, as John Maynard Keynes once put it, investment is the causa causans of production. In Keynes’s words, ‘… given the psychology of the public, the level of output and employment as a whole depends on the amount of investment. I put it in this way, not because this is the only factor on which aggregate output depends, but because it is usual in a complex system to regard as the causa causans that factor which is most prone to sudden and wide fluctuation.’

The dominant common sense of the economy we already have runs like this: First there is capital formation. Then there is investment. Then purchase of inputs. As Marx put it, ‘purchase of labour-power’ is a subset of purchase of inputs. Then comes production. Then sale of products. Only out of the revenue generated by sales at the end of this chain does the worker receive a pay check (or the investor a profit) with which to satisfy her or his wants and needs.

Investor confidence is the sine qua non of this system. The solution to a crisis is to restore confidence. In the case of Green New Deals confidence is to be restored with public investments specifically targeted at conversion to green technologies. Their novel selling point is that there is a lot of work to be done to green the economy. Therefore, there is a lot of profit to be made greening it, and in the process a lot of employment to be created. So, this time around, the standard public response to insufficient private investment gains an adjective: Green.

There are some silver linings: Ocasio-Cortez calls for ‘community-defined projects and strategies.’ While T-DEM and DiEM25 suggest new ways to capture wealth and move it to where it is needed. Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century calls for ‘…regaining control over the dynamics of capital accumulation…’ (p. 471). But, still, the thinking of people who propose Green New Deals sounds like the common sense of the left-leaning public. It is a common sense that blames the defeat of social democracy on political victories of the right, and on the lobbyists on mega-corporations. (See e.g. Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz).

My co-authors and I suggest, on the contrary, that social democracy (in the USA called ‘liberalism’) was never sustainable. We suggest that yesterday’s progressive change strategies could not possibly work. They were defeated by the causal powers of structural mechanisms working against them. They were and are powers inherent in modern society’s constitutive rules. Today’s Green New Deals may appear to be destined to be defeated for the same reasons inherent in the rules of the economic game that defeated yesterday’s social democracies. They were, notably: capital flight (what Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis call the ‘exit power of capital’), chronic weakness of effective demand, and the fiscal crisis of the state (a combination of too many obligations and too few resources). These mechanisms are, in turn inherent in the structures of private law and their projections in the structures of international trade. (For more details see http://unboundedorganization.org/the-swedish-model-as-programmed-for-failure/)

For some people it may be so obvious that whoever you are –liberal, conservative, or left-leaning—there is only one way to create employment. It is to crank up the old profit machine. For them, if I am going to say there is an alternative, I should say what it is. Since there is no space here to outline an alternative, let me say only that I subscribe to an unbounded, post-colonial and critical realist school of thought. We hold that the number of alternatives, far from being zero, is unlimited.

Indeed, some alternatives are suggested in today’s Green New Deals. I have been looking at them pessimistically as a re-match of social democracy vs. liberalism that social democracy is destined to lose. Now I would like to make a more optimistic historical comparison. We may be seeing a re-match of a confrontation that in Europe happened much earlier. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with prior antecedents and later consolidations. It expanded at various times as Europe conquered the rest of the world.

I refer to tendencies in the Green New Deals to contest and to attempt to reverse the establishment of what Joseph Schumpeter called the Steuerstaat (the tax state). The Steuerstaat is part and parcel of modernity’s construction of the rule of law and limited government. Since time immemorial, kings and emperors had seized gold and silver booty in war, minted it and kept it. Coins, Jesus says in the Bible, are to be rendered unto Caesar because they are Caesar’s. Sovereigns had many other ways of extracting surplus and seizing assets. Some are catalogued by Adam Smith in his historical account of how earlier sovereigns had financed themselves in The Wealth of Nations. The past ended and the present began in England in 1689 when William and Mary ascended the throne on terms dictated by Parliament, and in 1694 when the Bank of England was chartered as a private bank authorized to create money. In other places traditional financial privileges of rulers ended at various dates, usually gradually and incompletely.

A modern state is a state that has lost control over money. It lives on taxes granted by its parliaments. Nowadays it competes with 195 other states to attract investments by lowering taxes. As Jürgen Habermas showed in The Legitimation Crisis, the Steuerstaat of late capitalism inevitably loses legitimacy. Its obligations include steering the economy to profitability. They include serving the welfare of the people. Now they include obligations to save the biosphere. The expenses of doing its duties properly far exceed its resources.

Green New Deals include intelligent ideas for making it possible for governments to do their duties, including complying with social human rights like those Ocasio-Cortez invokes in her resolution. In this respect they propose to transform at least some of the causal powers of structural mechanisms inherent in modern society’s constitutive rules that made social democracy unrealizable.

Consider: The European New Deal declares the principle of sharing the returns of capital and wealth. It proposes a public digital payments platform, undermining private monopolies on important banking functions. It declares a right of ‘seigniorage’ on central bank profits. Even the name suggests recovering for democracies rights feudal lords lost at the beginning of modernity. It establishes an entity to be called the European Equity Depositary to receive several kinds of unearned and/or surplus income. Like the Piketty T-DEM proposals it calls for inheritance taxes and for sharing of income derived from intellectual property and other knowledge monopolies. Piketty and his colleagues, for their part, have elaborated proposals to replace tax rate competition among nations with tax collection cooperation. Also, for example doing studies of astronomical executive salaries, they have shown how to identify flows of income that can be transferred to fund meeting social objectives (via the public purse or via other routes) with no economic loss.

On the other side of the Atlantic, it is known that Stephanie Skelton and other advocates of restoring public control over money and banking have been talking with Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and other legislators identified with Green New Deals.

It is possible that we are nearing a point in history when Schumpeter’s forecast that the Steuerstaat would prove to be unworkable and collapse, and Habermas’s forecast that it would cease to appear as legitimate in the eyes of the public, are coming true. And it appears that among the advocates of Green New Deals –among at least some of them—there are scholars and activists designing the technical details of viable ways to achieve the common good post-crash.

Green New Deals can be thought of as bearing new wine in old bottles. The old bottles are demands for social justice. Now they include shock and dismay at threats to the survival of our fragile biosphere. They can easily become just another rationale for tax benefits for investors and for massive public investment financed by public debt even more massive than it already is. The new wine is the creative thinking that is seeking ways to achieve structural changes that will make it possible to succeed where social democracy failed.

SOURCE: EURASIA REVIEW

Ethiopia’s Failed Coup Attempt Almost Pushed The Country To The Edge Of Collapse

Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

BY ANDREW KORYBKO

A coup attempt in the historic Ethiopian core region of Amhara was narrowly thwarted even though the state chief was killed and the country’s top military leader was assassinated in a related incident that later took place in the capital, with the failure of this regional regime change effort saving Africa’s second most populous country from civil war and subsequent collapse, at least for now.

The “Ethiopian Gorbachev”
It’s been less than a year and a half since 42-year-old former intelligence official Abiy Ahmed took the reins of Africa’s second-largest country following what amounted to a de-facto “soft coup” in the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), after which he rapidly implemented radical domestic and international political reforms that saw several opposition groups delisted from their previous “terrorist” designation and the clinching of a peace accord with neighboring Eritrea. Ethiopia was in the news for all the right reasons and it looked like the country was on the path to becoming one of Africa’s rising powers, but the “Ethiopian Gorbachev’s” reforms unwittingly opened up the Pandora’s Box of ethno-regionalist tensions over its internal borders, which became more important of an issue than ever before after many came to believe that PM Abiy was sending signals of his eventual intent to decentralize the state.

Domestic Political Context

Africa’s second most populous country is already legally a federation but the former Tigrayan-led faction (Tigray People’s Liberation Front, TPLF) of the ruling party that had previously run Ethiopia prior to PM Abiy’s “soft coup” never allowed this to enter into practice, thus making it a de-facto centralized state in contravention of the constitution. Even so, while the old state of affairs had serious faults, such as its refusal to meet the regional demands of the Oromo people (the largest plurality in the country at roughly a third of the population and strategically concentrated in its central region) which almost pushed it towards civil war before PM Abiy’s appointment, it nevertheless largely kept the peace in the rest of the country through its heavy-handed leadership style. It eventually became apparent, however, that this was backfiring in the Oromia Region, hence the decision to elevate one of that group’s ethnic representatives — PM Abiy — as the head of state in a bid to placate the increasingly violent protesting masses.

Although Ethiopia has moved past the original Oromo Crisis that almost brought it to the brink of civil war, it’s unwittingly triggered several other ones all across the country following the explosion of ethno-regionalist nationalism that was unleashed as a result of PM Abiy’s Gorbachev-like reforms. The internal administrative borders of the East African giant don’t completely correlate to the actual ethnic distribution in the country despite certain groups being contiguous local majorities between states. For example, several well-known fault lines exist between the Oromia and Somali Regions, as well as between the Amhara and Tigray ones too. Minorities in one region, which constitute the majority in the adjacent one and are contiguous to each other across state lines, are afraid that the de-facto implementation of decentralization will make them victims of nationalist policies by the titular nation of their host region. Naturally, those said titular representatives and their supporters believe that the ethnic minorities in their region (which constitute a majority in the adjacent one) are stealing their people’s land, which has given rise to several local conflicts as state control loosened.

Abiy’s Ethiopia = Gorbachev’s USSR?

In spite of PM Abiy’s well-intended reforms, modern-day Ethiopia has become just as much of an ethno-regionalist tinderbox as the former Soviet Union was in the twilight years of Gorbachev’s leadership, with the only thing missing being the spark to set the whole state ablaze. The TPLF’s home region of Tigray is already largely opposed to PM Abiy’s reformist government as it is, and Ethiopians haven’t forgotten the military finesse of this comparatively minuscule minority (~6% of the total) in being the leading vanguard that made victory against the communist Derg possible during the last civil war. Furthermore, the Amhara — the second-largest plurality at slightly over 25% of the population — have always considered themselves to be the core of the Ethiopian nation and are inclined towards centralization, both de-facto and de-jure (like during the Imperial, Derg, and TPLF-led EPRDF eras). A rebellion in this region could conceivably cut neighboring Tigray off from the central government even more so than it already is, thus laying the ground for another civil war unless the government reversed its radical reforms.

Asaminew’s Coup Attempt In Amhara
The aforementioned context explains some of the strategic reasoning that went into the recent coup attempt, which was led by Amhara security chief Asaminew Tsige, who was released from prison last year after serving nearly a decade behind bars for involvement in a 2009 coup plot. PM Abiy let him and many others free over the past year and a half as a goodwill gesture to promote national reconciliation and signal the seriousness of his reforms, with the idea possibly being that if Asaminew and others were opposed to the TPLF-led EPRDF, then that makes them natural allies of his reformist government. That was a colossal mistake in hindsight because it overlooked the modus operandi of the 2009 coup plot, which Reuters described at the time as “using assassinations and bombings to create enough chaos to get supporters on the streets to topple the government.” In other words, Asaminew planned to wage Hybrid War on Ethiopia by using Unconventional Warfare (terrorism, assassinations, bombings, etc.) to catalyze a Color Revolution that he and his cohorts hoped would lead to the reversal of reforms and/or regime change.

That’s exactly what he attempted to do last weekend, when a team of his operatives assassinated Amhara’s regional leader and then an allied bodyguard killed the country’s top military leader shortly thereafter in the capital of Addis Ababa. Shortly before his coup attempt, Asaminew publicly urged his fellow Amhara to take up arms and form militias to defend their region, and it was actually this simmering security threat that the region’s chief was holding a meeting about when he was killed. Had Asaminew and his ilk successfully seized power in Amhara after decapitating Ethiopia’s military leadership through the chief of staff’s assassination, then both that region and Tigray would have been largely outside the control of federal forces and PM Abiy would have been forced to either reverse his reforms and hope that he’d still have enough support within the EPRDF to remain in office afterwards or fight an imminent civil war to restore the central government’s authority. Suffice to say, Ethiopia was almost pushed to the edge of collapse, and the consequences would been catastrophic for this nation of over 100 million people.

Hybrid War Hell In The Horn Of Africa

Apart from the “Weapons of Mass Migration” that would have swept across the region and possibly as far as Europe, this could have also endangered the country’s unity and possibly even resulted in a Horn of Africa version of Ralph Peters’ “Blood Borders“. The American military strategist infamously declared that “ethnic cleansing works”, which would be the inevitable outcome of an ethno-regional civil war that would either “Balkanize” Ethiopia into several “independent” states or at the very least radically revise its internal administrative borders to make them more closely correlate with the country’s post-war ethnic layout. In any case, Ethiopia is the military and diplomatic lynchpin of regional security, so its destabilization would have a ripple effect across the comparatively more fragile neighboring states of Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, as well as possibly endangering the peace with Eritrea if the Red Sea state saw a sudden opportunity to finally erase its former Ethiopian overseer from the map once and for all by resuming its support of armed separatist groups in the country.

No Foreign Fingerprints

It should be said at this point that the self-sustaining cycle of Hybrid War unrest that would have been unleashed had Asaminew’s coup attempt in Amhara succeeded wouldn’t have been in the interests of any foreign country. The Gulf States have come to command enormous influence over Ethiopia since PM Abiy’s entrance into office after the UAE helped broker the country’s peace deal with Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa heavyweight is one of China’s closest partners on the continent. Russia and Indiaare looking to invest more in it too, and Addis Ababa has always been very close to Washington when it comes to their shared anti-terrorist security concerns in Somalia. Although the cynical argument can be made that “Balkanizing” Ethiopia would help the US more easily divide and rule this strategic region, the chaotic consequences that it would have produced might have also damaged its own interests by weakening its allies’ “strategic depth”, especially that of the UAE and India vis-a-vis China. It therefore appears that Asaminew’s coup attempt was an entirely indigenous response to PM Abiy’s radical Gorbachev-like reforms and represents the fourth actual or attempted military seizure of power this year after Gabon, Algeria, and Sudan, proving that the “African Spring” continues to roll on.

Concluding Thoughts
Asaminew’s coup attempt in Amhara pushed Ethiopia to the edge of collapse, and although it was ultimately thwarted, it still exposed the country’s main fault lines and showed how vulnerable the Horn of Africa giant is to internal unrest as a result of PM Abiy’s radical Gorbachev-like reforms. The head of state now has to decide whether to reverse them, slow down the pace, or continue full steam ahead, with each choice having their respective benefits and detriments and therefore throwing the young leader on the horns of a massive dilemma. Making matters even more acute is the fact that Ethiopia is supposed to hold its first genuinely free and fair parliamentary elections sometime next year, which will be an historical turning point that will either finally stabilize the country or serve as a trigger event for exacerbating ethno-regionalist tensions. PM Abiy therefore has his hands full with almost as many possibly existential problems as Gorbachev did during the twilight years of the Soviet Union, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that Ethiopia is fated to follow the same path into the dustbin of history.

SOURCE: EURASIA

Dikembe Mutombo Records Ebola Messages For US Officials

In this Aug. 1, 2018, file photo, Dikembe Mutombo speaks during the opening ceremony of Basketball without Borders Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa. U.S. health officials are turning to a basketball hall of famer for help in one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in history. Dikembe Mutombo is regarded as one of the greatest defensive players in NBA history and is a well-known philanthropist in his native Congo. He recorded radio and video spots designed to persuade people to take precautions and get care that might stop the disease’s spread. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

BY MIKE STOBBE

NEW YORK (AP) — Unable to send disease fighters to help battle one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in history, U.S. health officials are turning to basketball hall of famer Dikembe Mutombo for help.

Mutombo, regarded as one of the greatest defensive players in NBA history and a well-known philanthropist in his native Congo, recorded radio and video spots designed to persuade people to take precautions and get care that might stop the disease’s spread.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began posting the spots Monday on its YouTube channel and on the agency’s website . Officials are trying to get radio and TV stations in the Democratic Republic of Congo to air them.

About 2,100 people have been reported ill — and nearly 1,500 have died — since an Ebola outbreak was declared in August in eastern Congo. It is the second deadliest outbreak of the lethal virus, which jumps from person to person quickly through close contact with bodily fluids.

Rebel attacks and community resistance have hurt Ebola response work in Congo. A World Health Organization doctor was killed in April, health centers have been attacked and armed groups have repeatedly threatened health workers. Because of safety concerns, the U.S. State Department last year ordered CDC disease specialists to stay out of the outbreak areas.

Mutombo, who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s intending to pursue a medical degree, told The Associated Press he understands where the distrust comes from.

“Someone who doesn’t look like you, who doesn’t think like you, who is not from your village, who is from other places, just walk to your village with a nice beautiful white truck and telling you ... ‘inject this chemical into your body to protect you from this deadly virus.’ That’s where there’s a fight. This is where we’re having a conflict,” he said.

“How do you that build trust? That’s the big problem we’re having in the Congo,” he said. “I believe as a son of Congo, I think my voice can be heard. Because everyone in the country knows my commitment to the humanity and the health.”

The idea for the PSA was sparked in February when Mutombo, a member of the CDC Foundation’s governing board who lives in Atlanta, was talking with Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director.

“We are deeply appreciative of his interest to try to get accurate information to the community,” Redfield said.

Mutombo, who turns 53 on Tuesday, previously did public service announcements focused on polio and yellow fever. A dozen years ago, his foundation established a 300-bed hospital on the outskirts of his hometown of Kinshasa.

The new spots were recorded in Kiswahili, French and Lingala. They talk about recognizing the early signs of Ebola, early treatment and prevention measures.

AP reporter Cody Jackson in Atlanta contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

What’s Going On? Black Children Between The Ages Of 5 And 11 Are Committing Suicide More Than Whites And Experts Don’t Know Why

Image via Urban Intellectuals

BY DAVID LOVE

ATLANTA BLACK STAR

Black children in America are having a hard time of it, as studies point to an increase in suicides. In a community where suicide is not viewed as a “Black thing,” and discussions about mental health are often viewed as taboo or not taken seriously, the statistics suggest that more must be done to stem the tide of a growing epidemic.

With historical adversity, psychological distress and racism impacting their mental health, the Black community is no stranger to suicide in America. Africans committed suicide on slave ships — in the case of the 1806 Igbo Landing mass suicide, Africans took their lives as an act of resistance — and on the plantation out of their suffering in captivity.

Historically, while Black suicide rates have been lower than white rates, Black suicide rates have been growing at a higher rate than those of their white counterparts, particularly from 1965 onward. Further, in recent years suicide rates among Blacks across age groups have been lower than those for whites, Native Americans — who have the highest suicide rates — and comparable to Latinos and Asian Americans. However, research also suggests Black suicides have been more prone to misclassificationand therefore likely underrepresented in the data, which would help explain the paradox of lower Black suicide rates despite the mental health risks Black people face.

Traditionally, Black youths have had a lower suicide rate than white youths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, a study published by the journal JAMA Pediatrics in 2018 revealed that the suicide rate among Black children under 13 years is now double the rate for white children in that age group. This reality applies to both girls and boys, the study says, and white suicide rates surpass Black rates in the teen years.

The study came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that suicides among black children under 18 increased 71 percent from 2006 to 2016, at a time when suicides among all children rose 64 percent. Some of the possible reasons offered for the increase include the impact of racism placing Black children at a higher risk, and the notion that suicide is not an issue in the Black community, thereby hampering any efforts at suicide prevention. In the Black community, there are false notions that people living with a mental health condition are “crazy” or just need to be stronger, and that one can simply “pray away” depression.

Other potential factors include issues such as easy access to the materials used to commit suicide, a profound feeling of loss or isolation, and bipolar disorder. Further, experts note that the racially disparate rates of children taking their own lives also reflect the general gap in health outcomes among Black people and their white counterparts. While suicides among Black children between 5 and 11 years old have increased substantially since the 1990s, researchers have not identified one particular reason to explain the disparity, and more research is necessary.

Suicide in America is now at its highest level in 50 years. The level of suicides was greater in 1933 during the Great Depression — as is the case in hard economic times — and dropped among all groups, including African-Americans, with the end of World War II.

A number of suicides of Black children, adolescents and young people have received media attention and focused attention on the issue. In 2018, Stormiyah Denson-Jackson, 12, killed herself in her dormitory at SEED Public Charter School in southeast Washington, D.C. Her family sued, accusing the school of not doing enough to prevent her death. Stormiyah, who according to family had previously attempted to take her own life, reportedly died a month after she told school psychologists she “didn’t want to live anymore.” The school allegedly concluded she was a “low-level suicide threat,” and “her grades were suffering and she was getting into trouble frequently.” Also that year, Rylan Thai Hagan, 11, hanged himself from his bunk bed with a belt. A trumpet player and model student, the sixth-grader from Washington, D.C., took his life days before Thanksgiving, and after qualifying for a basketball tournament at Walt Disney World.

Actress Taraji P. Henson, star of “Empire,” “Hidden Figures” and other TV and film projects, recently testified before a Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health. “We can’t give up on our kids,” said Henson. “The more we talk about [mental health], the more people will feel like they can talk about it.” Henson, who suffers from anxiety and depression, created the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation — named for her late father — to address suicide, mental health and prisoner recidivism.

“The ages of the children committing suicide are getting younger and younger. It breaks my heart that 5-year-old children are contemplating life and death,” Henson said at the hearing. “In the African-American community, we don’t deal with mental health issues,” she added. “We don’t even talk about it. We’ve been demonized for coming out saying we have issues.”

Other organizations are addressing mental health and suicide in the Black community, whose members are less likely to seek care. For example, the Siwe Project, which was formed to promote mental health awareness among people of African descent and reduce the stigma of mental illness and therapy, was named for Siwe Monsanto, 15, who committed suicide. No More Martyrs is a mental health awareness campaign supporting Black women living with mental health concerns.

I Live For is a nonprofit organization which uses storytelling, including short films, live events and social media to end the stigma of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety among teens and young adults of color. The founder of the organization, Nikki Webber Allen, is an entertainment industry veteran whose nephew Paul, 22, committed suicide in 2013 after struggling with anxiety and depression.

“At the time I wasn’t aware he was struggling from depression and anxiety disorder. His family did know, and he had been in therapy and his parents did everything they could to support him. He was a churchgoing kid, very spiritual had a deep connection to God and the church,” Allen told Atlanta Black Star. She noted that her nephew was an exceptionally bright young man who had a full scholarship to Morehouse College. Allen debunked the myth that people who commit suicide are outliers, nerdy, and the like. “But that’s not the case. The majority of people who die by suicide are your loved ones, your neighbors your friends,” she added.

Lee said she was devastated by Paul’s death because of her own anxiety and depression. “It broke my heart that he didn’t feel comfortable telling me about it, and I didn’t feel comfortable telling him about it,” Lee said. “I didn’t want to let him down and feel weak. And I learned he felt the same way. He didn’t want to share it because he didn’t want to let us down. Families are not being honest about it. Families have to know they can help and support and not be ashamed.”

Responding to her nephew’s suicide, Lee decided she had to do something. “When we lost Paul, I said this cannot be in vain. We are blessed with resources. My dad’s a judge, my mom’s a schoolteacher. It’s a loving supportive family, I’ve been in the television industry for 25 years. God didn’t put me on this earth with a loving family, connections through my television and storytelling not to do anything. I’ve been too blessed not to do anything.” Without having experience in nonprofits, Lee found her calling. With Paul’s parents’ blessing, she shared his story. “I believe that sharing stories about people who look like them is the best way to tackle stigma,” Lee said, noting that she hopes to create awareness. “Stories break stigma, and I started working on a documentary film. … I did a TED talk that has been viewed over 2 million times, I get emails and direct messages from around the world who say thank you for sharing your story.”

According to Lee, while a stigma already exists around mental health issues, that stigma is even more pronounced among Black and Brown communities. “Particularly within the states, when you look at the research, we have a greater stigma around mental health, but we have a greater risk around mental health,” she noted. “When you look at socioeconomic disparities, not being able to have access to health care, you add greater risk and greater stigma, you have a powder keg. That’s why I’m so passionate about speaking out. People you don’t have to suffer in silence. Our ancestors didn’t have access to things we have access to. If they could have they should have,” she added.

“It’s critical because these things can be managed. I still live with depression and anxiety, which ebbs and flows, but it doesn’t define me,” Lee said. “Through therapy I’ve learned self-care rituals such as yoga meditation and diet. Sometimes I fall off the wagon. … We constantly have to be aware and mindful of our mental health, especially if you are prone to anxiety and other mental health disorders.”

When asked about the underlying issues driving suicide among Black children and what is needed to address it, Lee said more research is necessary to understand the causes, of which people are not yet aware. “My first thought is it is across the board. We are experiencing in this country a huge increase in suicide, alcohol abuse and drug abuse, which are interrelated. … You use it to medicate the pain,” she said. “Suicide, depression and anxiety are increasing, and social media has contributed hugely to the increase in depression, suicide and anxiety among young people.

Further, Lee identifies changing family structure and increasing family instability, and the breakdown in some of the institutional foundations that were important in the Black community. “Younger generations are moving away from the church. They are more skeptical and not attending it as much. Whether you’re religious or not, the Black church was a large part of our foundation. And I wonder if that is breaking down a bit, and if that is one of those foundational changes that is hurting the community,” Lee added, also noting that often, people mistakenly believe that people can “pray away” their mental health issues by going to church, as opposed to doing it in tandem with professional treatment.

In addition to issues of racism, Lee also identifies social media and cyberbullying as factors contributing to suicide. “The bullying is so much worse. You have access to it 24/7. And this culture — social media is like a highlight reel of people’s best lives … and it looks like people have a perfect life, and my life sucks. People are putting it on and showing their best selves. Everyone is having a good time,” she said. “Combine that with racism, disparities, everybody has more money. I really think it’s a bad combination.” Studies have shown a link between social media and anxiety in teens, and researchers believe the potential links between social media — including cyberbullying — and suicide as a public health issue.

Suicide among Black youth occurs disproportionately among boys, with males accounting for as much as 80 percent of suicides among all African-Americans, according to Dr. Sean Joe, associate dean for faculty and research at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “Anxiety is a very important predictor for suicidal behavior, particularly among Black Americans,” Joe said in a podcast from the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at NYU. He noted that while suicide risks increase for whites as they age, for Black people the risk is highest for people under 35. Factors such as homelessness, psychiatric disorders, social isolation and trauma elevate the risk for suicide.

Further, Joe noted that Black youth are developing under different circumstances than previous generations of African-Americans, and are more accepting of the notion of taking one’s life. “If you find a Black male exhibiting signs or talking in a self-destructive way — that they don’t think life is worth living, that they feel that the world is against them — and if they are exhibiting any signs that are potentially signs of suicide and their behaviors are starting to change, they are starting to give away things and they’re trying to isolate themselves in a very concerning way, you want to take those signs very seriously and consider getting your child assessed and connect them with a therapist.”

While more work is needed to understand why Black children and young people are taking their lives, acknowledging the problem and coming to terms with Black mental health is a step in the right direction.

SOURCE OF ARTICLE

In Ghana, Russian And Chinese Business Interests Align

Tema Habor. Image via Modern Ghana

BY JOSEPH HAMMOND

TEMA (TSARIZM) -- With Putin announcing a Russia-Africa economic summit set for Sochi in October, there are growing signs of Russia’s influence in Africa. Such forums have proved the venue for major announcements of Russian policy in the past, especially on the continent where Russia’s policy is often aligning with those of China.

Indeed the 2018 St. Petersburg Economic Forum served as a venue to announce an agreement between Rosneft and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC). Under the terms of the agreement, Rosneft will deliver 1.7 million tons of LNG to Ghana through the port of Tema each year for 12 years. The tonnage aside, the deal marks an important step in the Russian Federation’s growing relationship with Africa.

“It’s very interesting that this deal was announced not in Ghana, but in Russia,” says Barbara M.E. Andoh a research associate at the Imani Center for Policy and Education, “Normally such deals have to be passed by the cabinet and the parliament, so the process is more transparent.” The final status of the agreement is unclear but, Andoh says the deal has attracted a great deal of attention.

At the time of signing, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin said the agreement was about more than just LNG and would “open up exploration, production and trading possibilities for the company,” in Ghana and West Africa.

Due process aside, the announcement suggested that Rosneft had emerged successfully over competing bids. The previous government of Ghana under President John Mahama signed three LNG import deals with Quantum Power Ghana, West African Gas Limited and Kaheel. However, wether Ghana needs all of this LNG, or indeed the gas volumes that Russia hopes to export to the country, remains unclear

“Ghana is likely to have a ‘gas-glut’ in the mid-term,” says Andoh”; our producing oilfields such as Jubilee, 10, and SGN, all produce gas as well. There is a need to project demand and project supply; there is a fear an oversupply of gas.”

Russia plans to develop Ghana’s own natural gas capacity. “We are looking to develop an IPP, Independent Power Project, which will take gas that would normally be burned as flare gas and recapture and use it on shore for power generation,” said an official from Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund.

Ghana’s first port was developed by British colonial authorities at Takoradi, where favorable geography blessed Ghana with one of the best natural ports in West Africa. An off-dock terminal with a capacity of 17,000 TEU opened in 2017. The GPA also plans to develop a new port in Keta a small isthmus in Eastern Ghana (close to the border with Togo) that will include both a commercial port and a marina for pleasure boats.

However it is Tema, a bustling port to the east of the capital city of Accra, that emerged as the main economic port soon after independence. It is the third busiest in West Africa (After Lagos, Nigeria and the twin ports of Lome, Togo) . Until recently the port was still home to the Meridian Rock, a modest offshore boulder that was marketed to tourists as sitting exactly on Latitude Zero — the Greenwich Meridian.

The rock which sat in front of an aged resort where Queen Elizabeth II once stayed was said to have spiritual and cultural significance for Ghanaians of Ga heritage.

A recent trip to Tema by the author failed to locate the rock, and the resort is long since gone. Instead, four new piers are being added to the harbour in part of a port expansion project that is projected to cost as much as $2 Billion.

China Harbour Engineering Company is working on the Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FSRU) necessary for the LNG project at Tema. The project will reportedly provide 1,600 jobs to Ghana. Last year, another FSRU that had been tapped for installation off Ghana was quietly sent instead to Spain.

When completed, the facility built by the China Harbour Engineering Company will be able to supply LNG sufficient for 30% of Ghana’s energy needs. Rosneft is one of the investors behind the project.

The LNG project is not the only energy infrastructure build in Ghana in recent years. In 2012 Ministry of Energy & Petroleum signed an agreement with ROSATOM for the development of Ghana’s nuclear industry. In June 2015 a similar agreement was signed between Ghana and Russia. However, here again, the Chinese and Russian efforts are supporting one another. This year a new government-owned special purpose vehicle was created to further develop Ghana’s nuclear industry. The new company has already signed cooperation agreements with both China and Russia. Ghana is emerging as yet another example of great power cooperation in the 21st century.

Fighting Ebola Is Hard But In The Congo Mistrust And Fear Is Making iI Harder

A motorcycle taxi driver gets his hands washed with a chlorine solution at a checkpoint between Beni and Butembo in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Temperatures are also checked and possible Ebola isolated. Still, many Ebola victims have travelled far distances and infected new parts of North Kivu and Ituri provinces. Image via CNN

BY DAVID MCKENZIE, BRENT SWALLS

BUTEMBO, NORTH KIVU, DR CONGO (CNN) -- When Ebola first struck this city of more than a 100,000 people last September, many here didn't believe it was real.

As the disease latched onto families and spread through tightly packed neighborhoods, rumors began spreading of organ harvesting and political conspiracies, even as more people got sick and died.
When the ambulances came to take people away - they would never see them again.

"They didn't know where they were taking them. They just thought they were going 'over there' to die," says Sylvestre Zongwe, a Congolese manager of primary healthcare at French NGO The Alliance for International Medical Action (Alima).

So instead of going for treatment, many stayed at home and died, their bodies still highly contagious and deadly for the family members who buried them.

"Fear prevents good management of the epidemic. Fear makes it difficult to break the chain of transmission. What was needed was to break the fear," says Zongwe.

It's this extreme mistrust, along with simmering conflict and what many responders on the ground believe has been a flawed response, that has allowed the world's second-biggest Ebola outbreak on record to continue unabated more than 10 months after the first cases were found.

Despite millions of dollars in funding, and an effective experimental vaccine, Ebola is spreading to new parts of Congo's North Kivu and Ituri provinces and re-infecting areas thought rid of the virus. This month, it also made the long-feared jump across the border to neighboring Uganda, though at this stage those isolated cases appear to be contained.

A conflict the world forgets

Butembo's residents live at the frontier of a conflict that the world often forgets.

Hemmed in by multiple armed groups that commit repeated atrocities and harassed by the national military frequently accused of human rights abuses, they are famously and understandably distrustful of newcomers.

Earlier this year, unknown assailants destroyed Ebola treatment centers in Butembo. In April, a World Health Organization epidemiologist was killed in an attack on the University Hospital. In total there have been 130 attacks on health facilities between January and mid-May, causing four deaths and injuring 38.

Because of these security concerns, the White House barred world-renowned specialists of the US-based Centers for Disease Control from setting up a base in the heart of the epidemic (although it does have staff based in the regional capital Goma.) Similarly, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) closed its treatment centers in some Ebola-hit areas and retreated to Goma.
Faced with an epidemic that is out of control and continued violence targeted at the response, health authorities are urgently searching for a different strategy to stop Ebola.

"During the first seven months of the epidemic we had more than 1,000 cases, now we have more than more than two thousand cases in a very short time," says Antoine Gauge, a response specialist with Doctor's Without Borders (MSF).

A draft internal World Bank assessment on the response from late May seen by CNN, describes the mounting shock at the rising death toll.

"Alarmed by the huge and unexpected surge in recent months in the number of new cases, a number of aid agencies and implementing partners have expressed concerns over many aspects of the response," it reads.

It describes a response top heavy on operational costs like salaries and hazard pay. More than half of the budget for WHO's strategic response plan during that period was allotted to staff remuneration. At the same time, it also shows that WHO was 40 million dollars short of its requested funding.
"We are absolutely outraged about how this response is going," one senior humanitarian official based in North Kivu told CNN, saying that WHO would be better served by letting more nimble expert teams, that cost far less, do the work. The official refused to be named, citing fear of criticism from the WHO.

Christian Lindmeier, a spokesman for WHO, says the organization is committed to the people of the DRC affected by the disease and that every key aspect of the response was labor-intensive.

"As some partners and NGOs have had to leave due to insecurity or other reasons, WHO has stepped in and absorbed their tasks," he said in an emailed statement.

"We owe a great deal of gratitude to the 700 brave WHO personnel who, working in partnership with the DRC Ministry of Health and hundreds of their national health workers, ensure that the response continues to operate across all vital functions, particularly when support is not immediately available from others."

Community care

Alima, the French NGO, believes it has found a solution to the mistrust that has stopped people seeking treatment. It's both hidden and in plain sight. Perched half-way up a hillside next to a school, their Ebola reception center is right inside a local clinic in the heart of the community.

A thermometer and a quick consult separates incoming suspected Ebola cases from other patients.
Community members were brought in and consulted at the beginning of the construction.
There are no alarming Ebola warning signs and posters. It just looks like part of the existing clinic. And that was the point: It's not a scary place, hidden away. It's in the community, as part of a system that treats all ailments.

"As soon as we fixed our approach, the results were there," says Zongwe.

But to the frustration of Alima, it is the only reception center of its kind in Butembo. Plans to build more have stalled. And, while innovative, it isn't nearly enough to stem the spread.

"This potentially could've been controlled earlier in the outbreak, when it was in a rural area, but letting it go fester underground with unknown chance of transmission, has really prolonged it, and we need to make sure we do everything we can to stamp it out now," says Dr. Ben Dahl, a leader of the CDC response based in Goma.

Innovation in treatment means if Ebola victims are identified quickly and get to treatment centers from reception centers, hospitals, or clinics, they have a much better chance of surviving.
To make treatment easier and less intimidating, Alima has developed what they call "the cube." Separated by a thin layer of transparent plastic, patients are able to interact more directly with doctors -- they can talk to family members who visit. All of it is an attempt to reduce the fear of Ebola and convince people to come in.

Major reset

During and after the devastating Ebola outbreak that spanned several countries in West Africa from 2014 to 2016 and killed more than 11,000, the WHO faced scathing criticism for acting too slowly and warning the world too late.

In response, the global health agency reorganized its emergency response structure and strengthened its operations.

But in this outbreak, at least according to the responders we spoke with on the frontlines of treating Ebola, it hasn't worked as planned.

David Gressly, freshly appointed by the UN as an Ebola Tsar of sorts, says the Ebola emergency response has gone through a major reset in recent weeks in the wake of internal criticism and a mounting death toll.

"If the virus continues to circulate, it remains a constant threat to spread to other provinces in this country and to neighboring countries and one day it will if we don't find a way to bring it to a halt," says Gressly, who previously managed the region's UN peacekeeping operations.

A motorcycle taxi driver gets his hands washed with a chlorine solution at a checkpoint between Beni and Butembo in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Temperatures are also checked and possible Ebola isolated. Still, many Ebola victims have travelled far distances and infected new parts of North Kivu and Ituri provinces.

CDC's Dahl says that the existence of the vaccine, which while experimental has been found to be 97% effective in the Congo, has led to complacency and the legwork of tracing patient contacts and quickly isolating them has not been done thoroughly.

"We were very fortunate to have this vaccine. It has probably reduced some of the cases and without it, we would have a much larger number of cases," he says.

"But they have not been doing the public health fundamentals of quickly following all the contacts, listing all the contacts, and isolating them as soon as it becomes symptomatic," he says.
He says around half of cases are still unknown to the contact lists and a large number of positive cases are deaths in the communities -- from people who wouldn't trust or couldn't get to early treatment.

Contact lists allow epidemiologists to ring-fence an outbreak. When a positive case of Ebola is identified, the victim is interviewed to find out who they were in contact with. All of those people get on a list and, in an effective outbreak response, they are closely monitored.

To get this outbreak under control, the CDC says more than 70% of cases need to seek treatment early and upwards of 80% of cases need to be on the contact lists. Otherwise, it will continue to spread.

Beaten up and stoned for taking temperatures

Samuel Mutahwa was unemployed when the virus hit Butembo, but when the outbreak hit he volunteered to help. Now he plays a critical detective role of tracing contacts that could help break transmission.

Armed only with a thermometer, he leads his contact tracing teams through the neighborhoods of Butembo. Twice a day for 21 days -- the maximum amount of time from time of infection to onset of symptoms -- they follow up with their list of patient contacts.

Mutahwa entered the compound of a grandmother and grandson that visited a sick friend in hospital. 

The friend later died.

"36.8 -- she is fine," says Mutahwa, holding a thermometer up to the smiling woman.

But earning the trust of his own community has been a hard fought and dangerous process. In the early months, Mutahwa says that he was beaten up and stoned.

"They said they were going to kill me. But I said no, I know what I am doing. I have to save the life of my people," he says.

Survivors part of the solution

Ebola is an intimate disease that is highly contagious but only contracted through direct contact.
It attacks families and then spreads through communities -- often through so-called "super-spreaders" the 20% of cases that spread the disease to 80% of the people.

It is often the personal choices of Ebola victims that can have an outsized impact on the transmission chain.

When the sister of Roger Mumbere Wasukundi, 17, got sick earlier this year, he says nobody wanted to believe that she had Ebola. They didn't even believe that Ebola existed.

After they buried his sister, his aunt got sick and quickly died. Roger, his mother, and his father all contracted the virus. Only Roger and his mother survived.

"I was sent to the treatment center because I didn't want to give up. They told me I could survive and I believed them. Everyone prayed for me," he says, sitting in his classroom in Butembo.

He still dreams of being a lawyer, but the virus still affects his health, his eyes clouded by the after effects of Ebola.

He believes that survivors like him can help turn the tide in the fight against Ebola and dispel the mistrust that has made the disease so hard to beat.

"Ebola survivors (need to) go talk to communities. Because this epidemic is very real," he says.