Category Archives: Socio-economic Collapse

Tuesday, March 28th, 2017 6:17am

Patient transfers and virtual airlines on agenda

Today's House of Keys questions contain queries about two issues which have been very much in the spotlight recently.

Ayre and Michael MHK Tim Baker has two questions about the patient transfer contract, the award of which to a new companysparked a public outcry.

They are for the health and social care minister.

Following the collapse of Citywing, Ramsey MHK Lawrie Hooper wants to know if the infrastructure minister has plans to prevent so-called virtual airlines from continuing to operate in the Isle of Man.

Ramsey MHK Dr Alex Allinson will ask the treasury minister when the former Albert Road school was put up for sale, to whom it was sold to and what development has taken place on the site.

Garff MHK Daphne Caine wants to know what plans the education minister has to urgently review the catchment areas for Onchan's primary schools.

Lawrie Hooper has a question for the policy and reform minister on what government's policy is to reduce disadvantages arising from socio-economic inequality.

And North Douglas MHK David Ashford will ask the infrastructure minister about what plans he has to bring in regulations for on-street parking of motorhomes and other large vehicles.

There's coverage of Keys questions on AM1368, online at manxradio.com and via our smartphone apps from 10am.

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Keys tackle topical consumer concerns - Manx Radio

-Editorial-

Santiago de Len Caracas, or "Caracas" as the capital of Venezuela is known to most, is the city with the third worst quality of life in Latin America. A 2016 report by the Mercer consulting firm found only Havana and Port au Prince to be worse places to live in from a list of 123 cities across the region, based on criteria that include socio-economic levels, transport, schools and crime. It's a new low for Caracas, which has been steadily dropping in the list over the past few years.

Meanwhile, a new report on nutrition on the website Prodavinci finds that Venezuelans have been eating less and less since 2013. It cited figures by the government statistics agency INE to show that through the second half of 2013 and the first half of 2014, households cut their intake of 57 out of 62 listed food items. INE found that between 2013 and 2015, the number of Venezuelans who ate more than three times a day fell from just over 14 million to just under 12 million, with a corresponding rise in people eating less than three meals a day.

Venezuela is experiencing the worst economic collapse in the modern history of Latin America. All Venezuelans able to migrate seem to have done so, and the country finds itself with a severe dearth of qualified technicians and professionals. The late President Hugo Chvez dismantled the country's productive apparatus, focusing instead on the production and export of oil, while importing virtually everything else.

In Caracas, Venezuela Photo: Joka Madruga/Terra Livre Press/ComunicaSul

Infrastructure has deteriorated to the point where power and water shortages and damaged roads are the norm now. Schools and offices open two or three days a week, and life in a Venezuelan city has become a daily misery consisting of trying to buy food, avoiding muggers and learning to live without reliable electricity or tap water. With pharmaceutical shortages, people have turned to home remedies. Inflation is fluttering at three-digit heights, and childbirth and infant mortality are on the rise.

Others qualify it more plainly as a drug gang in power.

All this explains why 70% of Venezuelans disapprove of President Nicols Maduro. The government may insist it is doing fine, but who could dispute that it is time for Maduro to step down and put an early end to his "working-class presidency?" The government's political record seems as bad as its economics. The civil rights group Foro Penal observes a sharp rise in arbitrary arrests since Maduro was elected. While Chvez was happy with "just 113" political prisoners, Maduro has locked up 310, which Foro Penal divides into three categories: "those jailed to get them out of the political game," like conservative politician Leopoldo Lpez and former mayor of Caracas Antonio Ledezma; "those in a particular social group," like student activists; and "propaganda detainees" held to "justify a particular measure."

Maduro is a duly elected president, but his own government violated the Venezuelans' right to vote in October 2016, when it suspended elections for mayors and state governors. They were suspended because regime candidates were set to lose, and no regime that does that can call itself democratic. By blocking the vote, Maduro acted as a dictator would.

Photo: Joka Madruga/TerraLivrePress.com

Indeed, there was a whiff of the dictator about him as soon as he took office exactly four years ago, with his predecessor's blessing. His first step was to meddle with the judiciary, as his mentor Chvez had begun to do, by naming loyal judges. That came in handy after the opposition won an overwhelming majority of seats in parliament, as the courts began to issue verdicts undermining, if not nullifying, the powers of the legislature. Maduro had the judiciary approve the state budget for 2017, which parliament had lawfully rejected, and his nominee as Central Bank chief.

Some are increasingly calling this presidency a "constitutional dictatorship," while others qualify it more plainly as a drug gang in power. The arrests in Miami of the president's two godsons Efran Campo and Francisco Flores was at least a pointer to the regime's alleged drug-related shenanigans. They were said to be linked to the so-called "Suns cartel," a trafficking gang supposedly run by Venezuelan generals.

The United States is now accusing Maduro's first Vice-President Tareck El Aissami of being a drug kingpin and has frozen his monies in the United States, which shows an increasingly clear policy by the Trump administration to confront the regime and back the opposition. The secretary-general of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, has proposed suspending Venezuela from the OAS until proper democracy is restored, and called for presidential elections scheduled for 2018 to be forwarded to this year.

We agree with Almagro. We believe Venezuela cannot take any more of the Maduro regime. The time has come for other Latin American governments to demand free, and immediate, general elections in Venezuela.

All rights reserved Worldcrunch - in partnership with AMERICA ECONOMIA

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Venezuela, Constitutional Dictatorship Or Drug-Gang Regime? - Worldcrunch

Corruption in Jamaica is entrenched and widespread. Jamaica must give serious consideration to what lies ahead should the Government and the countrys lawmakers fail to decisively and aggressively confront its corruption problem.

Jamaica has long suffered from a perception that it is a highly corrupt country. Only a few days ago, the United States Department of State, in its March 2017 annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, described corruption in Jamaica as being entrenched and widespread. Even more disturbing is the fact that the US State Department has utilised virtually the same language for at least the past seven years running to characterise the magnitude and depth of the problem.

In the 15 years in which Transparency International (TI) has ranked the country in its annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI), Jamaica has averaged a CPI score of only 35 out of 100, where zero means highly corrupt, and a score of 100 representing the state of being very clean. Jamaicas 2016 CPI was 39.

Tipping point

TI has said that a CPI score of under 50 signals prevalent bribery, a lack of punishment for corruption, and public institutions that do not respond to the needs of citizens. Jamaica has probably reached a tipping point.

It is also noteworthy that a major study that was conducted in 2015 by a global think tank, the Institute for Economics and Peace, concluded that when a countrys CPI falls beneath 40 it would have reached a tipping point for the collapse of government institutions, instability, and a rise in internal violence.

It is arguable that Jamaica may have reached this tipping point and is already witnessing some of these manifestations.

To begin with, while none of Jamaicas institutions has collapsed, some are in a state of relative dysfunction. It is also indisputable that Jamaica has achieved notoriety as a murder capital of the world, and as a country thats stricken with inordinately high levels of crime and violence.

For the 10-year period 2005 to 2014, Jamaica was ranked, after Honduras and El Salvador, as having the worlds highest murder rate per capita, with 14,968 murders committed, or 49.1 murders per 100,000 people.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), in its 2016/2017 Global Competitiveness Report, has ranked Jamaica as being among the worlds three worst countries on the business costs of crime and violence, and among the worlds five worst on organised crime. The report was based on a survey of 138 countries.

Perceived corruption

Jamaicans, themselves, do not have a favourable view of their countrys leaders, nor of some of the country most critical institutions, when it comes to the issue of corruption.

The TI Global Corruption Barometer, which assesses the perception of corruption in national institutions globally, in 2013 found that 86 per cent of Jamaican respondents saw the countrys police as corrupt/extremely corrupt. Some 85 per cent felt the same way about the countrys political parties, while 74 per cent viewed the Parliament in a similar light.

Only three senior public officials have been jailed for corruption in Jamaica since the island became independent, nearly 55 years ago. This is a striking phenomenon. It can only be interpreted as supporting the view that corruption and impunity in Jamaica are deeply entrenched and widespread.

Weak structures and legislation

The 2017 Jamaica Integrity Commission Bill is weak.

Despite promises that have been made by successive administrations to strengthen the countrys anti-corruption institutional framework, Jamaicans are yet to see anything of substance that will effectively address the pervasive and endemic corruption that has long afflicted the island.

The much-heralded and long-awaited Jamaica Integrity Commission Bill, that was passed in the House of Representatives on January 31, 2017, will not advance Jamaicas anti-corruption fight.

I have argued elsewhere that the Bill, in many respects, is weak, and does not reflect present-day international best practices in anti-corruption and anti-bribery. Further, the Bill has failed to fulfil some of Jamaicas key international anti-corruption treaty obligations.

The proposed Jamaica Integrity Commission is structurally flawed.

The Integrity Commission, as proposed by the Bill, and which will merge the Office of the Contractor General, the Parliament Integrity Commission, and the Corruption Prevention Commission, is also structurally flawed. Theres no question that it will fail as an effective and efficient anti-corruption institution.

Contrary to international best practices, the commission will have no CEO to co-ordinate, direct and manage its day-to-day operations, or to be held accountable for its affairs.

Added to this is the fact that the commissions several directors will be subjected to the directives of five commissioners who, by law, can give any of them (except the prosecutions director), special or general directions. This will obviously lead to a very unwieldy situation, while undermining the operational integrity, effectiveness and efficiency of the commission.

It is also important to note that the Integrity Commission will neither be a single nor independent anti-corruption commission as it was intended to be. It will have no powers of detention or arrest. Neither will it be independent in its criminal investigative function. It will have to rely upon other law enforcement agencies, inclusive of the police which do not report to it for assistance in the foregoing regard.

These are serious best practice deficits. At the end of the day, the commission will lack full control over who is investigated, when, and how they are investigated and, ultimately, who is to be prosecuted by its prosecutions director.

Playing politics with corruption

Successive Administrations havent honoured anti-corruption commitments. But what is concerning is that, although Jamaica knows precisely what must be done to escape the tentacles of corruption, it appears to lack the courage of leadership, and the political will, to effectively implement even the very corrective measures that its successive administrations had promised they would bring to the fore, if they were elected into office.

The ruling Administration, for example, had committed, in its pre-election manifesto, to bring an end to the incidence of rampant corruption in Jamaica. Very importantly, it had acknowledged that corruption impedes economic growth, undermines the rule of law, and tears down the fabric of society. It had also said that Jamaica can be transformed, but only if corruption is tackled in an uncompromising manner.

That said, it then committed that if it were elected into office, it would be revising the work already under way, on the Integrity Commission Bill, regarding the proposed Integrity Commission, and making revisions to ensure its effectiveness.

However, and as is now well known, this was not done. The Bill was passed in the House on January 31, 2017, almost one year after the Government was elected into office, but without the promised revisions taking place.

The immediately preceding Administration is not blameless either. Prior to entering office, it, too, in the then pre-election debates, had committed to combat corruption and, in particular, to strengthen the Office of the Contractor General (OCG). However, within just six months of being elected to office, it filed several applications in the Jamaica Supreme Court to curtail the powers and functions of the OCG. The move was subsequently frowned upon by the court when it summarily dismissed the applications in its February 2013 ruling.

Breaking pre-election commitments goes to the root of credibility and trust. When leaders, anywhere, act in this way, it goes to the very root of their credibility, and the trust that a believing electorate has reposed in them.

Transparency International, in January 2017, while commenting on elections in Africa, was moved to urge African leaders, who win elections on the anti-corruption platform, to live up to their pledges. The Speaker of Nigerias Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly, Onofiok Luke, a lawyer by profession, has gone one step further. On February 7, 2017, during an address, he said that a failure by politicians and political parties to fulfil election campaign promises should be seen as a form of corruption, and that offending politicians should be prosecuted.

The cost of corruption

The costs of corruption are far-reaching. Corruption is a major concern for developing, emerging and developed economies, alike. However, for developing countries, like Jamaica, the magnitude of the potential for the adverse socio-economic consequences that corruption portends is substantial.

Corruption erodes the quality of life of citizens by diverting public funds away from critical social necessities, such as health care, education, water, roads and electricity.

Corruption also leads to human rights violations, steals political elections, distorts financial markets, reduces investor confidence, stunts business activity, wipes out jobs, fuels migration, increases the price of goods and services, undermines and destroys confidence in public institutions, and enables organised crime, terrorism, and other threats to human security to flourish. And, yes, corruption also kills.

Many studies have been undertaken in an effort to estimate the monetary costs of corruption and bribery. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, in 2014, estimated that the cost of corruption equals more than five per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP), or approximately US$2.6 trillion, with over US$1 trillion paid in bribes each year.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a May 2016 news article, estimated the annual cost of bribery at a massive US$1.5 to US$2 trillion, globally.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies has equated private sector bribery in developing countries to a tax on growth. It says its costing at least US$500 billion each year, or more than three times the total amount of foreign assistance that these countries received in 2012.

The WEF estimates that corruption increases the cost of doing business by up to 10 per cent on average. Other studies have estimated that the cost of corruption is akin to a 20 per cent regressive tax that foreign investors must face.

Interestingly, the World Bank estimates a four times increase in a countrys per-capita income, in the long run, when it fights corruption.

What of Jamaicas future?

Sustainable economic growth is not possible without combating corruption. Jamaica has averaged GDP growth of 0.5 per cent per annum over the last 20 years, and 0.2 per cent per annum over the past 10 years, and has now set its eyes on an ambitious GDP growth target of five per cent in the next four years, but, curiously, without the support of a clearly articulated and aggressive anti-corruption plan.

The country is not short on eminent advice as to why this is futile. In his July 2013 visit to Jamaica, Professor Tommy Koh, Singapores ambassador-at-large, cautioned Jamaicas leaders that a zero-tolerance approach for corruption, and a strong rule of law, are the two strategies that Jamaica will need in its efforts to achieve economic growth and sustainable development. He said that these were the cornerstones of Singapores success.

In an October 25, 2016 joint press conference with Pakistans Foreign Minister, the IMFs Managing Director Christine Lagarde was quoted as saying that the economic progress of a country is impossible without curbing corruption. Earlier, in May 2016, at the London International Anti-Corruption Summit, Lagarde warned: If you are pro-growth, you must be against corruption.

Combating corruption, as a driver of foreign investment, sustainable economic growth, and development, is a principle that is universally acknowledged. It has been consistently enunciated by the United Nations, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European Union, the G20 and G8, the IMF, the World Bank, and a host of other multilateral institutions and world leaders.

No excuses

Jamaica has run out of excuses for failing to end corruption. But Jamaica does not need to be persuaded about the perils of the cancer of corruption, nor why it must be decisively and aggressively tackled. The Governments own 2013 National Security Policy speaks lucidly, instructively, and convincingly on the issue.

This is what it says:

(a) Crime, corruption and violence are the primary threats to the nation.

(b) Violence, crime and corruption have profoundly retarded Jamaicas development.

(c) The economy is now, at best, one-third of the size it should have been, and may be only one-tenth of the size it could have been.

(d) Effective action against crime and corruption would do more to improve the economy of Jamaica than any other measure.

(e) The most important task facing Jamaica now is to root out crime and corruption, and thereby address the underlying causes of poverty and suffering in the country.

Quite recently, on March 6, 2017, Ghanas President Nana Akufo-Addo, on the occasion of his countrys 60th independence, said that Ghana had run out of excuses for failing to end poverty and corruption.

It occurred to me then, that Jamaica, as it approaches its 55th year of Independence in August, had also run out of excuses for failing to end corruption and poverty.

Greg Christie is an attorney-at-law, governance consultant, and a Jamaica public body director. He is a former contractor general of Jamaica; country director, vice-president and assistant general counsel for Kaiser Aluminum; and a university law lecturer. Send comments to the Observer or

gjannat@jol.com.

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Jamaica's future choked by cancer of corruption - Jamaica Observer

A toxic combination of declining social status, poor health and failed relationships is being blamed for the troubling uptick in mortality rates among white Americans in middle and working classes, according to new data from demographers.

Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton refer to the reversal in historic mortality trends as deaths of despair the predictable outcome of declining economic opportunities coupled with rising levels of drug abuse, obesity, drinking and suicide among non-college educated whites.

One startling finding from their survey: In 2015, mortality rates for non-Hispanic whites with a high school degree or less was 30 percent higher than blacks (927 versus 703 per 100,000 people). In 1999, rates for non-Hispanic whites of the same group were 30 percent lower than for blacks.

The researchers published their findings Thursday in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, as a follow-up to their 2015 study which first documented the increase in mortality.

This is a story of the collapse of the white working class, Mr. Deaton, who won a Nobel Prize for economics in 2015 for his work on poverty, told the Associated Press in an interview. The labor market has very much turned against them.

A decline in economic and social well-being are contributing factors to the high rates of death among both white men and women aged 45-54 without a college degree, the researchers found. The causes of death ranged from disease and suicide to complications with drug and alcohol use.

Instances of death are not confined to a particular location, with high rates in both rural and urban areas.

The most important variable uncovered by the survey is education. Mortality is rising for those without, and falling for those with, a college degree, the researchers wrote in the papers summary.

In their original 2015 study, the researchers said they were shocked to learn that while mortality rates declined for every other ethnic group in the U.S., they were increasing among non-Hispanic whites.

Mortality rates have been going down over 100 years or more, and then for all this to suddenly go into reverse, we just thought this must be wrong, Mr. Deaton told NPR.

Ms. Case added that the recently published work seeks to thread a narrative to explain the factors leading to the increase. Its consistent with the labor market collapsing for people with less than a college degree and then in turn that having effects on the kind of economic and social supports that we usually think people need in order to thrive.

The most obvious way the government can address the crisis, the authors write, is to stem the over-prescription of opioids blamed for the deaths of over 33,000 in 2015.

Theres a lot of literature that suggests that people who have poor socio-economic support, possible financial struggles are at a higher risk for addiction, said Dr. Rishi Kakar, a psychiatrist at the Segal Institute in Fort Lauderhill, Florida, and a specialist in addiction treatment. My view is that a lot of these individuals do not have proper access to treatment for their opioid addiction. These are the individuals who are financially stressed and do not have enough resources.

The difference in mortality rates between whites and other races can be partly explained by the differences in expectations, according to sociologist and author Andrew Cherlin. He explained the phenomenon, Reference Group Theory, in the New York Times last year.

Its likely that many non-college-educated whites are comparing themselves to a generation that had more opportunities than they have, whereas many blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to a generation that had fewer opportunities, Cherlin wrote. Reference group theory explains why people who have more may feel that they have less. What matters is to whom you are comparing yourself.

For those with little education and low job prospects, changing societal norms have eroded an important safety net once afforded by family and religion.

These changes left people with less structure when they came to choose their careers, their religion, and the nature of their family lives, Case and Deaton write.

The authors also put a high priority on marriage as a stabilizing factor that fosters a continuing role for fathers in the lives of their children.

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A toxic combination of declining social status, poor health and failed relationships is being blamed - Washington Times

Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa (left) tours Arda Antelope in Maphisa in Matabeleland South accompanied by Arda Board chairman Basil Nyabadza and other dignitaries in this file photo

Business Editor, Prosper Ndlovu IN pursuit of a new trajectory of accelerated economic growth and wealth creation, the Government formulated a strategy known as the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-Asset: October 2013-December 2018).

In the foreword to this economic blueprint, President Mugabe noted that the strategy was crafted to achieve sustainable development and social equity anchored on indigenisation, empowerment and employment creation, which will be largely propelled through judicious exploitation of the countrys abundant human and natural resources.

One such resource is the land, which is now in control of a majority of Zimbabweans following the successful land reform programme since the turn of the millennium.

This results-based agenda, said the President, is built around four strategic clusters that are meant to enable Zimbabwe to achieve economic growth and reposition the country as one of the strongest economies in the region and Africa. The four strategic clusters are: food security and nutrition; social services and poverty eradication; infrastructure and utilities and value addition and beneficiation.

The revival of the agriculture sector as the backbone of the countrys economy is at the heart of Zim-Asset as it speaks to the food security goals as well as the value addition and beneficiation thrusts. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) play a key role in this matrix as they add impetus in fast-tracking attainment of set economic targets. One of the flagship projects is the partnership between the Agricultural and Rural Development Authority (ARDA) and Trek Petroleum at Antelope Estate in Maphisa, Matobo District and Ingwizi Estate in Mangwe District.

Since February 2015 when ARDA entered into a five year partnership with Trek Petroleum, Antelope and Ingwizi Estates, which were on the verge of collapse, have registered improved output, creating more job opportunities for local communities. Recent reports show that ARDA Antelope, the pioneer project under the partnership, has made dramatic recovery and progressively expanded wheat and maize hectarage under rain-fed farming and irrigation cropping.

In the 2016/17 season, ARDA Antelope has 500ha planted under maize, which would be increased to 750ha in the coming winter cropping and 1 000ha in the next rain-fed season, ARDA board chair Mr Basil Nyabadza said recently. ARDA Ingwizi is at 600ha with plans to increase to 850ha this winter and 1 000ha by year-end. This means the two estates would by the end of the year have the capacity to produce about 10 000 tonnes of the crop each, which would contribute immensely to food security in the drought prone province.

During a visit to the two estates a fortnight ago, Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa said output conditions were ripe for Maphisa growth point in particular, to be turned into an agro-processing hub in Matabeleland South.

We already have silos and driers here and the next plan is to set up a milling plant for wheat flour and mealie-meal. With time if we grow soya bean here we will then need to set up an oil expressing firm.

We need to do manufacturing and packaging here. The market should go to where the product is and not the other way round. This means shops in Bulawayo and elsewhere will come here and order products. This will create more jobs in this area and this is the vision we have, said VP Mnangagwa.

He said the Governments objective was to facilitate inclusive development where ordinary people in communities participate in project development. The Vice President said there was a synergy between improved agricultural production and infrastructure development. He said establishment of a processing factory in Maphisa would necessitate a quick road infrastructure upgrade and attract more service providers to invest in the business centre.

This means everything will be done here and people from Bulawayo will come and get produce here. With such a big business, it will also be easy to fix the road network. When this is done Zimbabwe will bid goodbye to hunger. So, this is what we want, to achieve self sufficiency using local resources, said the VP.

He said a similar model could be applied to all productive zones in the country where agro-processing inputs like cotton, soya bean, tobacco, meat and horticultural produce was in abundance.

Chief Nyangazonke from Kezi also hailed the project but urged improved relations with the local community through mutual consultation with the traditional leadership.

This is a good project for us but communities need to be clear of what their input is? What their control is, and what is their benefit? These areas need consultation with locals so that we do not become visitors in our institution or projects, he said.

We are looking forward for employment of local people there. There should be a clear percentage of, say shares, to locals. The programme should also have a synergy with local farmers on the livestock front because our wealth lies in cattle.

On beneficiation of farm produce, Chief Nyangazonke said there should be a model of ensuring that milling, packaging and other services were given to locals so as to empower the community.

The community needs to feel part of this dream and have ownership for its success. There should not be a situation where people feel as outsiders or be treated as intruders. Even the elderly should feel the project is theirs and benefit from it, he said.

The chief said the expansion of ARDA Antelope should also encompass imparting farming skills to locals as well as training services to agricultural colleges and attachees. He said sustainable farming should also consider wild animals, which are part of the wealth of the community.

Zimbabwe is looking forward to a bumper harvest this year after receiving above normal rains. The Command Agriculture scheme, a specialised maize production programme, has added impetus with more farmers embracing the Government supported scheme. Communal farmers, who also benefited from the Presidential Inputs scheme, are also expected to get positive yields despite hiccups such as shortage of fertiliser and the outbreak of pests such as the fall army worm, which affected some crops, mainly in January.

Prospects for the 2016/17 season, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Mechanisation and Irrigation Development, indicate that the country would harvest an excess of two million tonnes enough to meet domestic consumption and processing industry needs.

Government has already suspended grain imports saying the country has enough food reserves with more deliveries expected at the Grain Marketing Board depots when harvesting starts next month.

Agro-processing industries such as millers, brewery and stockfeed manufacturers stand to benefit immensely from improved yields. Increased yields are set to spur agro-processing industrial output, Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries president, Mr Busisa Moyo said.

Beyond 2017, experts say Zimbabwe now needs to come up with a strategic model to enhance food production throughout the year using irrigation farming. This is crucial in view of droughts experienced in the last few years across the country and the region at large, which are testimony to the reality of climate change that had made rain-fed agriculture unreliable.

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Turning Maphisa into an agro-processing hub - Chronicle

For Eric Hobsbawm, the Russian Revolution which occurred, as it happens, in the year of his birth was the central event of the 20th century. Its practical impact on the world was far more profound and global than that of the French Revolution a century earlier: for a mere thirty to forty years after Lenins arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, one third of humanity found itself living under regimes directly derived from the [revolution] and Lenins organisational model, the Communist Party. Before 1991, this was a fairly standard view, even among historians who, unlike Hobsbawm, were neither Marxists nor Communists. But finishing his book in the early 1990s, Hobsbawm added a caveat: the century whose history he was writing was the short 20th century, running from 1914 to 1991, and the world the Russian Revolution had shaped was the world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980s a lost world, in short, that was now being replaced by a post-20th-century world whose outlines could not yet be discerned. What the place of the Russian Revolution would be in the new era was unclear to Hobsbawm twenty years ago, and largely remains so to historians today. That one third of humanity living under Soviet-inspired systems before 1989-91 has dramatically dwindled. As of 2017, the centenary of the revolution, the number of Communist states in the world is down to a handful, with Chinas status ambiguous and only North Korea still clinging to the old verities.

Nothing fails like failure, and for historians approaching the revolutions centenary the disappearance of the Soviet Union casts a pall. In the rash of new books on the revolution, few make strong claims for its persisting significance and most have an apologetic air. Representing the new consensus, Tony Brenton calls it probably one of historys great dead ends, like the Inca Empire. On top of that, the revolution, stripped of the old Marxist grandeur of historical necessity, turns out to look more or less like an accident. Workers remember when people used to argue passionately about whether it was a workers revolution? have been pushed off stage by women and non-Russians from the imperial borderlands. Socialism is so much of a mirage that it seems kinder not to mention it. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the Russian Revolution, it is the depressing one that revolutions usually make things worse, all the more so in Russia, where it led to Stalinism.

This is the kind of consensus that brings out the contrarian in me, even when I am to a large extent part of it. My own The Russian Revolution, first published in 1982 with a revised edition coming out this year, was always cool about workers revolution and historical necessity, and made a point of being above the political battle (mind you, I wrote the original version during the Cold War, when there was still a political battle to be above). So its not in my nature to come out as a revolutionary enthusiast. But shouldnt someone do it?

That person, as it turns out, is China Miville, best known as a science fiction man of leftist sympathies whose fiction is self-described as weird. Miville is not a historian, though he has done his homework, and his October is not at all weird, but elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving. What he sets out to do, and admirably succeeds in doing, is to write an exciting story of 1917 for those who are sympathetically inclined to revolution in general and to the Bolsheviks revolution in particular. To be sure, Miville, like everyone else, concedes that it all ended in tears because, given the failure of revolution elsewhere and the prematurity of Russias revolution, the historical outcome was Stalinism: a police state of paranoia, cruelty, murder and kitsch. But that hasnt made him give up on revolutions, even if his hopes are expressed in extremely qualified form. The worlds first socialist revolution deserves celebration, he writes, because things changed once, and they might do so again (hows that for a really minimal claim?). Libertys dim light shone briefly, even if what might have been a sunrise [turned out to be] a sunset. But it could have been otherwise with the Russian Revolution, and if its sentences are still unfinished, it is up to us to finish them.

Mark Steinberg is the only one of the professional historians writing on the revolution to confess to any lingering emotional attachment to it. Of course, revolutionary idealism and daring leaps into the unknown tend to result in hard landings, but, Steinberg writes, I admit to finding this rather sad. Hence my admiration for those who try to leap anyway. But even Steinberg whose study of the lived experience of 1917, based largely on the contemporary popular press and first-person reports, is one of the freshest of the recent books has largely abandoned his earlier interest in workers in favour of other social spaces: women, peasants, the empire and the politics of the street.

To understand the current scholarly consensus on the Russian Revolution, we need to look back at some of the old controversies, notably the one about inevitability. For Steinberg, this isnt a problem, as his contemporary worms-eye view ensures that the story is full of surprises. But other writers are almost excessively eager to tell us that outcomes were never set in stone and things might always have gone differently. There was nothing preordained about the collapse of the tsarist autocracy nor even of the Provisional Government, Stephen Smith writes, in his sober, well-researched and comprehensive history. Sean McMeekin seconds this, affirming that the events of 1917 were filled with might-have-beens and missed chances while at the same time tipping his hat to show who the intellectual enemy is: these events were far from an eschatological class struggle borne along irresistibly by the Marxist dialectic. In other words, the Marxists, Western and Soviet, were all wrong.

Historically Inevitable?, an edited collection, addresses the question of necessity directly by offering a series of what if? studies of key moments of the revolution. In his introduction Tony Brenton asks: Could things have gone differently? Were there moments when a single decision taken another way, a random accident, a shot going straight instead of crooked could have altered the whole course of Russian, and so European, and world, history? But Dominic Lieven is surely speaking for the majority of the volumes contributors when he writes that nothing is more fatal than a belief that historys course was inevitable. To be sure, those contributors see contingency as playing a greater part in the February and October revolutions than in the post-October path towards terror and dictatorship. Orlando Figes, author of a widely read study of the revolution, The Peoples Tragedy (1996), devotes a lively essay to showing that, had a disguised Lenin not been admitted without a pass to the Congress of Soviets on 24 October, history would have turned out differently.

In play here are various politically charged arguments about Soviet history. First, there is the question of the inevitability of the collapse of the old regime and the Bolshevik triumph. This is an old Soviet article of faith, hotly disputed in the past by Western and, particularly, Russian migr historians, who saw the tsarist regime on a course of modernisation and liberalisation that the First World War interrupted, plunging the country into disarray and making the previously unimaginable Bolshevik victory possible (Lieven, in one of the most sophisticated essays in the volume, characterises this interpretation of Russias situation in 1914 as very wishful thinking). In the context of past Sovietological debate on the revolution, raising the question of inevitability was interpreted not just as a Marxist claim but as a pro-Soviet one, since the implication was taken to be that the Soviet regime was legitimate. Contingency, conversely, was the anti-Marxist position in Cold War terms except, confusingly, when the contingency in question applied to the revolutions Stalinist outcome, as opposed to its onset, in which case conventional wisdom held that a totalitarian outcome was inevitable. Figes holds the same view: while contingency played a big role in 1917, from the October insurrection and the establishment of a Bolshevik dictatorship to the Red Terror and the Civil War with all its consequences for the evolution of the Soviet regime there is a line of historical inevitability.

In an attack on the whole what if? genre of history, Richard J. Evans has suggested that in practice counterfactuals have been more or less a monopoly of the Right with Marxism as target. Thats not necessarily true of the Brenton volume, despite the inclusion of right-wing political historians like Richard Pipes and the absence of any of the major American social historians of 1917 who were Pipess opponents in the bitter historiographical controversies of the 1970s. Brenton himself is a former diplomat, and the last sentence of Historically Inevitable? We surely owe it to the many, many victims [of the revolution] to ask whether we could have found another way rather endearingly suggests a diplomats propensity to try to solve problems in the real world, as opposed to the professional historians habit of analysing them.

Pipes, who served as Reagans Soviet expert on the National Security Council in the early 1980s, was the author of a 1990 volume on the revolution that took a particularly strong line on the basic illegitimacy of the Bolshevik takeover. His argument was directed not only against the Soviets but also against revisionists closer to home, notably a group of young US scholars, mainly social historians with a special interest in labour history, who from the 1970s objected to the characterisation of the October Revolution as a coup and argued that in the crucial months of 1917, from June to October, the Bolsheviks had increasing popular, notably working-class, support. The 1917 revisionists work was solidly researched, usually with information from Soviet archives which they had been able to access thanks to newly established official US and British student exchanges; and much of the field held it in high regard. But Pipes saw them as, in effect, Soviet stooges, and was so contemptuous of their work that, in defiance of scholarly convention, he refused even to acknowledge its existence in his bibliography.

The Russian working class was an object of intense interest for historians in the 1970s. This wasnt only because social history was in fashion in the profession at the time, with labour history a popular sub-field, but also because of the political implications: did the Bolshevik Party in fact have working-class support and take power, as it claimed, on behalf of the proletariat? Much of the revisionist Western work on Russian social and labour history despised by Pipes focused on workers class consciousness and whether it was revolutionary; and some but not all of its practitioners were Marxist. (In the non-Marxist wing, I annoyed other revisionists by ignoring class consciousness and writing about upward mobility.)

The authors of the centenary books all have their own histories that are relevant here. Smiths first work, Red Petrograd (1983), fitted the labour history rubric, although as a British scholar he was somewhat removed from American fights, and his work was always too careful and judicious to allow for any suggestion of political bias; he went on to write a fine and underappreciated study, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (2008), in which the workers and labour movements continued to play a central role. Steinberg, a US scholar of the next generation, published his first book on working-class consciousness, Proletarian Imagination, in 2002, when social history had already taken the cultural turn, bringing a new emphasis on subjectivity with less interest in hard socio-economic data. But this was more or less a last hurrah for the working class in writing on the Russian Revolution. Pipes had rejected it outright, holding that the revolution could be explained only in political terms. Figes in his influential Peoples Tragedy focused on society rather than politics, but minimised the role of the conscious workers, emphasising instead a lumpen proletariat raging in the streets and destroying things. In their new works, Smith and Steinberg are both uncharacteristically reticent on the subject of workers, though street crime has entered their field of vision.

McMeekin, the youngest of the authors here, set out to write a new history, by which he means an anti-Marxist one. Following Pipes, but with his own twist, he includes an extensive bibliography of works cited or profitably consulted that omits all social histories except Figes. This includes Smiths and Steinbergs earlier books, as well as my own Russian Revolution (though it is cited on p.xii as an example of Marxist, Soviet-influenced work). It could be argued that McMeekin doesnt need to read the social histories since his focus in The Russian Revolution, as in his earlier work, is on the political, diplomatic, military and international economic aspects. He draws on a multinational archival source base, and the book is quite interesting in detail, particularly the economic parts. But theres a whiff of right-wing nuttiness in his idea that Marxist-style maximalist socialism is a real current threat in Western capitalist countries. He doesnt quite call the whole revolution, from Lenins sealed train in April 1917 to the Rapallo Treaty in 1922, a German conspiracy, but thats more or less what his narrative suggests.

The end points people choose for their histories of revolution reveal a lot about their assumptions of what it was really about. Rapallo is, appropriately, the end point for McMeekin. For Miville its October 1917 (revolution triumphant), for Steinberg 1921 (not so much victory in the Civil War, as you might expect, as an open end with revolutionary business unfinished), and for Smith 1928. The last is an awkward choice in terms of narrative drama, as it means that Smiths book ends with two whole chapters on the 1920s, when revolution was on hold under the New Economic Policy, a retreat from the maximalist aims of the Civil War period made necessary by economic collapse. Its true, something like NEP might have been the outcome of the Russian Revolution, but it actually wasnt, because Stalin came along. While the two chapters on NEP, like the rest of the book, are thoughtful and well-researched, as a finale its more of a whimper than a bang.

This brings us to another highly contentious issue in Soviet history: whether there was essential continuity from the Russian/Lenin Revolution to Stalin, or a basic disruption between them occurring around 1928. My Russian Revolution includes Stalins revolution from above of the early 1930s, as well as his Great Purges at the end of the decade, but that is unacceptable to many anti-Stalinist Marxists. (Not surprisingly, Mivilles annotated bibliography finds it useful though unconvincingly wedded to an inevitabilist Lenin-leads-to-Stalin perspective.) Smiths cohort of 1917 social historians generally felt much like Miville, partly because they were intent on defending the revolution from the taint of Stalinism; but in this book, as on many issues, Smith declines to take a categorical position. Stalin certainly thought of himself as a Leninist, he points out, but on the other hand Lenin, had he lived, would probably not have been so crudely violent. Stalins Great Break of 1928-31 fully merits the term revolution, since it changed the economy, social relations and cultural patterns more profoundly than the October Revolution had done and moreover demonstrated that revolutionary energies were not yet exhausted. Still, from Smiths standpoint its an epilogue, not an intrinsic part of the Russian Revolution.

Even-handedness is the hallmark of Smiths solid and authoritative book, and Im uneasily conscious of not having done justice to its many virtues. Really the only trouble with it and with many of the works being published in this centenary year is that its not clear what impelled him to write it, other than perhaps a publishers commission. He identified this problem himself in a recent symposium on the Russian Revolution. Our times are not especially friendly to the idea of revolution I suggest that while our knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War has increased significantly, in key respects our ability to understand certainly to empathise with the aspirations of 1917 has diminished. Other contributors to the symposium were similarly downbeat, the Russian historian Boris Kolonitsky noting that, while finding out the truth about the Russian Revolution had seemed enormously important to him back in Leningrad in the 1970s, interest in the topic is now falling drastically. I sometimes wonder: who cares now about the Russian Revolution? Steinberg asks sadly, while Smith writes on the first page of his Russia in Revolution that the challenge that the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 posed to global capitalism still reverberates (albeit faintly).

*

In purely scholarly terms, the 1917 revolution has been on the back burner for some decades now, after the excitement of the Cold War-fuelled arguments of the 1970s. The days are long gone when the late imperial era could be labelled pre-revolutionary that is, interesting only in so far as it led to the revolutionary outcome. That started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, with social and cultural historians of Russia starting to explore all the interesting things that didnt necessarily lead to revolution, from crime and popular literature to the church. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the revolution shrivelled as a historical subject, revealing behind it the First World War, whose significance for Russia (as opposed to all the other belligerents) had previously been remarkably under-researched. That same collapse, by stripping away the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union, brought questions of empire and borderlands to the fore (hence Smiths subtitle, An Empire in Crisis, and Steinbergs chapter on Overcoming Empire).

In the 1960s, it was self-evident to E.H. Carr, as well as to his opponents like Leonard Schapiro, that the Russian Revolution mattered. It mattered to Schapiro because it had imposed a new political tyranny on Russia that threatened the free world, and to Carr because it had pioneered the centralised state-planned economy that he saw as a portent of the future. Coming to the subject in the 1970s, I concluded that, along with the many betrayals of socialist revolution pointed out by Trotsky and a host of others, there were also many achievements in the realm of economic and cultural modernisation, notably state-sponsored rapid industrialisation in the 1930s. Hobsbawm made a similar point on a wider canvas when he noted that Soviet-based communism became primarily a programme for transforming backward countries into advanced ones. The modernisation point still seems right to me, but it has been tarnished by the fact that, on the economic side, it is a kind of modernisation that no longer looks modern. Who cares now about building smoke-stack industries, except in a context of polluting the environment?

Brentons confident summation has a free-market triumphalism that, like Fukuyamas End of History, may not stand the test of time, but it reflects the negative verdict of much current writing on the Russian Revolution:

It has taught us what does not work. It is hard to see Marxism making any sort of comeback. As a theory of history the revolution tested it, and it failed. The dictatorship of the proletariat did not lead to the communist utopia, but merely to more dictatorship. It also failed as a prescription for economic governance. No serious economist today is advocating total state ownership as the route to prosperity not the least of the lessons of the Russian Revolution is that for most economic purposes the market works much better than the state. The rush away from socialism since 1991 has been Gadarene.

If the Russian Revolution had any lasting achievement, he adds, it is probably China. Smith, in more cautious terms, makes a similar assessment:

The Soviet Union proved capable of generating extensive growth in industrial production and of building up a defence sector, but much less capable of competing with capitalism once the latter shifted towards more intensive forms of production and towards consumer capitalism. In this respect the record of the Chinese Communists in promoting their country to the rank of a leading economic and political world power was far more impressive than that of the regime on which it broadly modelled itself. Indeed, as the 21st century advances, it may come to seem that the Chinese Revolution was the great revolution of the 20th century.

Now thats a conclusion that Putins Russia still uncertain what it thinks of the revolution, and therefore how to celebrate it needs to ponder: the Russian Revolution brand is in danger. Perhaps by the time of the bicentenary Russia will have worked out a way to salvage it, as the risk of losing a chapter in the world history of the 20th century is surely one that no patriotic regime should ignore. For the West (assuming that the extraordinarily resilient dichotomy of Russia and the West survives into the next century), it is bound to look different as well. Historians judgments, however much we hope the opposite, reflect the present; and much of this apologetic and deprecatory downgrading of the Russian Revolution simply reflects the short term? impact of the Soviet collapse on its status. By 2117, who knows what people will think?

See the article here:

What's Left? - London Review of Books (subscription)

Just as the ANC cannot suddenly introduce meritocratic performance as an employment criterion anywhere that supporters have been rewarded with a job, the wine industry cannot suddenly abandon its accredited training systems and its community outreach projects, whether or not they are really producing palpable benefits.

Like everything else that has been left to cadre deployment, essential infrastructure has collapsed in a welter of ineptitude and corruption. Not all these failures are equal: as the roads get worse, the number of off-road vehicles on urban roads simply increases. As power availability and distribution deteriorates, businesses which require ample supplies of electricity simply shut down or generate the own requirements. However, when, through lack of foresight and planning, the state fails to provide water for urban dwellers, theres no easy fix. If you think the current service delivery protests have the potential to turn scary, the great-granddaddy of them all lurks in the failure to deliver clean fresh water to the 15-million or so residents (12-million South African citizens and probably three-million foreigners) living in Gauteng and delivering more than a third of the countrys GDP.

Of course this is symptomatic of a greater malaise: the belief that past injustices can be used to justify present pillaging. There may be a sense of symmetry to this logic but it is both functionally indefensible (a shirt stolen from Edgars in Eastgate cannot be returned to Stuttafords in Sandton City) and not conducive to proper nation building. To feed more people, the cake must grow in size, so it's not a good idea to attack the bakers.

Harvard Professor Ricardo Hausmann made this very clear at a recent CDE briefing when he highlighted the dangers of creating an internal enemy white monopoly capital. This, he said, is based on a fundamental lie and is super-counterproductive... But it is a scapegoat and a dangerous one because it puts the accent on the firms that exist when the problem of SA is the firms that do not yet exist that need to employ the nine-million people who dont work.

Blaming someone or something else to deflect attention from ones own shortcomings is not a uniquely South African solution to political incompetence, though, as with many things, weve taken the sleights of hand of others and raised them to an art form. For Hitler the problem with the post-Great War German economy was the Jews, and the strategy of blaming them for his countrys ills turned out to be potent muti in his quest for power. Only afterwards (and the post-World War ll generation of Germans is still paying the price for this) did the lie seem obvious, but by then tens of millions of people were dead and the country lay in ruins.

The Cape wine industry has been wrestling (sort of) with the problem of transformation. However, since the wine business is intrinsically unprofitable (it's estimated that around 50% of all producers are actually losing money), it doesn't lend itself to the kind of BEE deals that worked so well with listed companies in the 1990s. With no easy way to change the complexion of the farming or production side, and plenty of pressure to look like it's doing the right thing, the industry has come up with a host of proposals all with suitably arcane BBBEEE scorecard acronyms. These include L&D (Learning and Development), LMS (Learner Management Systems), SEC (Socio-Economic Development) and ED (Enterprise Development) terminology that would make its way easily to George Orwell's Top 10 list.

There are numberless courses for cellar workers (skills enhancement) as well as a smattering of programmes for those who work in the vineyards. As one committed but pragmatic producer put it recently: You will be surprised to see how many certificates we issue annually... From fire prevention to health and safety to forklift and tractor driving to how to prune young vines, Windows95, MS Word 97, etc etc.

Rosa Kruger, one of the country's foremost viticulturists, is less concerned about scorecards and more concerned with the systemic issues affecting wineland communities. Her arguments are to-the-point, simple and blunt, and relate primarily to the importance of introducing basic training for vineyard workers, and making it compulsory for farmers to send their workers to attend two such courses every year. Empowerment starts with education. Social upliftment starts with education. I have lost too many vineyard workers to Tik, TB and violence, to not notice the absolute desperation. I think by education we can start the long and cumbersome process of upliftment. If Kruger has her way, the obligation to send vineyard workers on these courses would become mandatory for producers seeking certification under the Integrated Production of Wine (IPW) guidelines.

Here is where the Orwellian world of not-very-useful acronyms misses the intersection with the real world. Like cadre deployment (which really means giving the largely under-skilled party faithful the money which should be invested in managing existing infrastructure and building new power stations, pipes and roads before the old ones collapse), many of the options chosen by the industry are scorecard-related. They sound good, they may even make those involved feel good, but they're not doing much for the country's future.

However, they share with cadre deployment the status they enjoy simply by being entrenched. Just as the ANC cannot suddenly introduce meritocratic performance as an employment criterion anywhere that supporters have been rewarded with a job, the wine industry cannot suddenly abandon its accredited training systems and its community outreach projects, whether or not they are really producing palpable benefits. However, there is also a difference: whatever the shortcomings of the industrys formal efforts, the intention is to produce a higher skills and happiness quotient. The same obviously cannot be said about cadre deployment. DM

More here:

Cadre deployment does little for the country's future or the wine ... - Daily Maverick

The Dutch elections did not herald a populist spring in Europe. So much for the good news.

Contrary to the prevailing coverage in foreign media, the takeaway of the Dutch elections should not be that Wilders' PVV party didn't acquire a leading position - this was to be expected - or that the 30-year-old green candidate, Jesse Klaver, won ten seats (this was, however laudable, largely at the expense of other left-wing parties).

The key takeaway should rather be the consolidation of conservative and right-wing liberal parties in the Netherlands, and the further fragmentation of the political landscape.

The left-wing parties of PvdA (S&D), Groen-Links (Greens) and SP (GUE) have taken fewer seats altogether in the parliament than the PvdA had in its past mandate: 37 vs 38. They now represent less than a quarter of the votes.

How did the left collapse so badly?

One strand of thought considers the disappearing dichotomy between left and right on socio-economic issues. Some see this as a structural tendency, whereas others see this as a temporary phenomenon.

The liberal-conservative VVD and the social-democrat PvdA were the biggest adversaries in the 2012 election, but the coalition government of these two parties minimised the differences between them.

Indeed, a demonstration of the differences on many issues such as tax avoidance, bankers bonus, flexible labour contract, and so on is necessary for the voters to see the dichotomy, and it is necessary for the election campaign to revolve around socio-economic issues.

Another strand of thought points to the ongoing fragmentation of the political landscape.

The Socialist Party of Emile Roemer has been competing with the charismatic new kid, Jesse Klaver, to draw in disenchanted PvdA voters.

Yet only 10 of the 29 seats that were lost went to either of the two left-wing parties according to IPSOS, a research firm.

In fact, it was very clear that neither of these two parties were good alternatives. Some voters turned to Liberal party D66, which takes a position in the middle, and some did not turn up to the ballot boxes at all.

Others found their way to relatively new parties.

For instance, Denk won three seats from voters with non-Dutch ethnic backgrounds, mainly Turkish and Moroccan. 50+, a party that focuses on upset pensioners, increased its share to four seats. Finally, the animal party - a mixed bag of extreme left, ecologists and EU sceptics - captured a further five seats.

Yet, Mr. Rutte did not suffer from the fragmentation, even though there has been a flurry of new right-wing parties. Despite having lost eight seats, his liberal-conservative VVD remains in an unchallenged pole position.

It is surprising to see how tepidly many among the left have responded to this defeat, sharing in the Europe-wide sigh of relief after holding off Geert Wilders.

It could be said that the decline of the left is a mix of both tendencies. The PvdA has not been able to contrast with and confront the right-wing Mark Rutte, and the scattering of the political field into special interest parties has paralysed and diluted the left.

So, we will face a third term of a prime minister whose party has taken no measures on climate change. A party that pursues an active agenda of making our country more unequal. A party that celebrates the blessings of tax avoidance (under the euphemism of positive investment climate).

A party that greedily adopts the belligerent anti-immigration language of Geert Wilders, to pay lip service to his potential voters.

Wilders won five seats and lost any prospect of governing, but his biggest win is that he lured people into believing that the elections were a struggle between right and far-right

After two decades of right-wing prime ministers, there is a tremendous amount of work to do for the left to make the Netherlands more inclusive, more equal and more socially just.

The onus will be on a broad left-wing movement that can connect people beyond special interests and that dares to confront and contrast with the right.

Lets start our fight.

Paul Tang is a Dutch MEP from the Socialists & Democrats Group in the European Parliament and a member of the Labour Party (PvdA) in the Netherlands.

More here:

How to stop the collapse of the Dutch left - EUobserver

Residents in fishing communities along the Lower Volta Basin (LVB) have called on the government to adopt and implement the small-scale cluster fish farm ownership system as a measure to restore their source of livelihood.

They said the lack of political will by successive governments to implement the policy, which formed the core of recommendations of a research work on how to restore the depleting fishery stock in those communities, had posed serious socio-economic challenges to the residents.

The University of Ghana (UG) conducted the research in 1999 to assess the impact the construction of the Akosombo and Akuse dams had on the people.

Specific recommendations were made for the government to design the small-scale aquaculture initiative to support the fisherfolk, but no pragmatic steps have been initiated since the research.

Visit

To press home their demands, two advocacy organisations, the Inland Culture Fisheries Association of Ghana (ICFAG) and the Fisheries and Aquaculture Alliance Network of Ghana (FAANG), last Friday toured some of the communities within the LVB.

They visited communities such as Asutuare, Mepe, Aveyime, Torgome and Dafor-Adidome, where they interacted with the residents.

Government support

The Policy Advocacy Advisor of FAANG, Mr Godwin Awudi, called for immediate steps by the government to tailor its agriculture policy Planting for Food and Jobs to suit the needs of the fisherfolk.

The LVB used to be a booming area for wild fishing and clamp culture. The industry provided economic empowerment to the residents, including women, who survived on clamp culture. But now, the construction of the dams have deprived them of their economic livelihood, he said.

He underscored the need for pragmatic steps to be taken by the government to support the fisherfolk in the area through the small-scale cluster fish ponds programme to resuscitate the local industry.

Concerns

Some residents in the communities visited expressed concern over the activities of Chinese fishermen who had taken over the cage aquaculture activities along the LVB.

According to 30-year-old Edwin Avorganu, the local fishermen did not have enough resources to compete with the Chinese who hired the services of the locals at a cheap cost.

The National Coordinator of the ICFAG, Mr Simon Ogah, pointed out that the collapse of clamp culture and the dwindling fortunes of the fishing industry in the LVB had resulted in social challenges such as increased cases of teenage pregnancy and migration of the youth to urban areas.

He said development had worsened the poverty in those fishing communities and called for urgent adoption of the research recommendations to restore the livelihood of the people.

See the rest here:

Implement new fish farm system urgently - fishing communities appeal - Graphic Online

It was one of those brain storming sessions of the Gujarat government soon after Narendra Modi had taken charge of the state administration after his thumping victory in the 2002 assembly polls. Times were tough and the power situation in the state were grim. The officials had gathered to discuss the problem and how to best to solve it.

Chief minister Modi was present and so were some his cabinet members. For some time, the discussion meandered on. Loud debates and disagreements meant that many proposals did not find favour. Then, one engineer sitting in the back of the room spoke up.

Why not create a separate feeder line especially for farmers which will help them draw as much power, he asked. The proposal was greeted with general laughter and derision. Most people in the room said this can never be done. Two people who remained silent during the discussion, Modi and the Gujarat power minister, later spoke up and wanted to know more. The engineer explained why he thought this idea will work. Modi listened and liked the idea. Despite the objection of the bureaucracy, the Gujarat government went ahead and decided to construct a separate feeder line to give farmers uninterrupted power.

Flash forward to 2014. Its October and the BJP has just won the Maharashtra assembly elections. The BJP always fought the elections together with the Shiv Sena but this was first the time that they had fought alone. The party managed to emerge the single largest in the 288 member assembly besting the Sena and the Congress twins. In Mumbai, various caste factions had begun their hectic lobbying for the chief ministership post. Traditionally, the Marathas had enjoyed an upper hand when it came to the top position in the state and BJP Maratha leaders were perhaps confident that one of their own would be appointed CM. Imagine their shock when Modi picked Devendra Fadnavis, a Brahmin, as the candidate. The state has not seen a Brahmin chief minister since Manohar Joshi of the Shiv Sena in 1995, a reflection of the massive upsurge in Maratha and backward caste dominance in the state politics. But Mr Modi, now prime minister and BJP chief Amit Shah were clear it was Fadnavis they wanted. The decision was final.

Screaming headlines in newspapers and breathless talking heads on TV since last Saturday will try and convince you that Yogi Adityanath, the newly elected chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, is some kind of a scary figure who should never come near any position of power or authority. He has been referred to as `Hindutva mascot, `Hindutva warrior in newspaper headlines and copies and there are various references to incendiary speeches during his career as a five-term MP from Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Well-known political and socio-economic commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta called the appointment of Yogi Adityanath an odious and ominous development. He added that Adityanath is a mascot of militant Hindu sectarianism, reactionary ideas and thuggery in political discourse.

Mehtas hyperbole is typical of the left-liberal establishment to Adityanath and social media on Saturday buzzed with indignant journalists and political pundits expressing anguish over the move. Has the BJP mistaken a majority verdict for a majoritarian verdict, some asked.

Actually, the decision should not have been surprising if political pundits had been following prime minister Narendra Modis decisions closely since he took over in 2014. Modi has rigorously followed his instincts and his own ideas for reshaping the party based on a unique assessment of the political landscape, current and future. The above mentioned examples show Modis penchant for out-of-the-box thinking and he has followed up his bold Maharashtra experiment with similar `shock moves in other states.

For instance: Vijay Rupani, chief minister of Gujarat is a Jain baniya and belongs to the minority community, Raghubar Das, the chief minister of Jharkhand, is an OBC (other backward caste) from the Teli community in a predominantly tribal state, while ML Khattar, the chief minister of Haryana is Punjabi in a state where the Jats rule the roost.

Some say that this is Modis way of empowering minority castes and communities. Some others believe that this is a good way of keeping chief ministers in check as they would become wholly dependant on Modi without a power base of their own within the state.

The Yogis appointment however doesnt fit both categories. He has a strong base of his own in UP not to mention a loyal and energetic band of followers. And he is certainly not from any of the lower, deprived castes that need to be empowered.

The logic therefore of appointing Yogi is different and is closely tied to BJPs ascendancy and its ability to stay in a dominant position for a long time to come. Think about it this way. Modi knows more than anyone else that the BJPs rise in the past few years to pre-eminent national status is due to strong state-level leadership and the work done by the chief ministers. He himself has been a big beneficiary of this model. Modi 2014 would never have happened without the Gujarat success.

Modi also knows that more high quality state-level leaders, that is leaders who combine charisma, mass appeal with administrative acumen, are needed if the BJP has to have any chance of progressing beyond 2019 as the nations dominant party. The Modi appeal may be shining bright as of now in the aftermath of tremendous success in UP but it could quickly get clouded by missteps and underperformance in key states. Key lieutenants who will helm top-level positions and deliver performance that can win elections are important.

Secondly, strong state-level leaders will also ensure that the party does not fall into the same trap that crippled the Congress party and reduced it to an also-ran status. The dependence on one family, the complete, near-total absence of quality regional leaders who can take the battle to the opposite camp, lack of direction and absence of message means that the Congress is at the edge of precipice. Any more state election losses (and there could be some in 2017 and 18), the party could start losing key people and be a shell of its former self.

So, where does the Yogi Adityanath move fit in amidst all this. Firstly, he is extremely popular in UP, especially among the youth. He is incorruptible and his sanyasi status with no family ties sharply reduces the chances of family-led corruption that has brought many politicians to ruin. He is a Hindutva warrior, the head priest of the centuries-old Gorakhpur Shaivite sect. Unlike some other BJP leaders, he doesn't have to prove his Hindutva credentials to anyone. Add to all this, he is a five-term Gorakhpur MP who was winning elections when there was no Modi and the BJPs popularity was at its nadir. The choice, on paper and the on the ground, was clear.

Critics have slammed Modis move claiming that Adityanath lacks administrative experience and is too polarising a figure. PB Mehtas anguish stems largely from the fact that Modi, having won UP, has failed to appoint a consensus-driven, moderate to the top post and instead appointed an aggressive, in-your-face, Hindutva warrior.

This is just drivel and somebody of Mehtas stature and intellect should know better. All politicians in India are polarising figures, whether it is Bal Thackeray, MK Karunanidhi, Kanshi Ram, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad Yadav. Even Mamata Banerjee, whom many people believe will be Modis opponent in 2019, is an intensely polarising figure.

Political movements and parties that last cannot be built on consensus and me-too policies to the sound of gentle media applause and choir singing. The leader of a successful political movement must have the courage and conviction to articulate bold, controversial policies and go out and achieve success by persuading others of the justness of his cause. Great political movements and parties are built this way.

Former RSS leader Balasaheb Deoras recognised how this worked and set out to build the RSS ecosystem and spread the message of Hindutva in the 1970s and 1980s. LK Advani, as the leader of the rejuvenated BJP, built on it with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Narendra Modi took Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayees work many levels higher with his theme of development and progress. All these people polarised public opinion but they are all accepted by the media and public at large. Why should Yogi Adityanath be any different?

In fact, after the collapse in UP, one would have thought that the intelligentsia and the public would avoid the topic of polarisation. If there is anything that this election proved, it showed how unpopular people were with the Akhilesh Yadav government. The SP govt had polarised public opinion to such an extent with its pro-Yadav, pro-Muslim policies, that the entire state took to the voting machines to throw them out with vengeance. If you want to talk about polarisation, talk about Akhilesh Yadav and his SP coterie.

The second major criticism against Adityanath that he lacks administrative skills is also a weak attack. Modi had little experience when he set out to be Gujarat chief minister in 2001 but he prospered and thrived. What is surprising is that the same people who are now crying hoarse about Adityanath skill sets were looking the other way when the younger Yadav was promoted to the CM post ahead of the 2012 elections. What experience did he have? What skill sets did he bring with him?

The correct way to examine Yogi Adityanath is whether he will follow in the footsteps of Advani and Modi by acquiring administrative skills and demonstrating a commitment to economic progress and prosperity. Whether he will make the transition from a consummate, political warrior with street-smart skills to one who can unite a state and help it out of the economic gloom and morass that it has been pushed into due to years of misgovernance and neglect. The answer to this question will shape BJPs future and Indias economic growth prospects.

Link:

Advani, Modi and...Yogi? Why Adityanath's appointment is a political masterstroke by Modi - Economic Times