The most crucial factor in whether South African SEZs succeed may well be the complicated role of China.
There are three aspects worth discussing: overall demand; Chinese incoming FDI to South African SEZs (such as is driving Coega and Musina-Makhado); and Chinese-financed and built (...)
There is no such thing as a ’resource curse’ and Africans are no more corrupt than others.
Late last month, the Senegalese government made it clear it was not going to cave in to pressure to revise state energy contracts. This was despite weeks-long protests and calls from the opposition and (...)
The African Union’s Assembly of Heads of State and Government conceived of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) in 2012 with the goal of creating a Continental Free Trade Area by 2017. In March 2018 the majority of AU member states signed the agreement to establish the free (...)
The World Social Forum’s “Thematic Forum on Mining and Extractivism” convenes from 12-15 November 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, just after the Southern Africa People’s Tribunal on Transnational Corporations. In between, at the notorious 2012 massacre site on the platinum belt to the west, (...)
In April of this year, SOMO co-organized a workshop in Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania) to share experiences and learning on addressing adverse impacts of business activities on communities and workers in Eastern and Southern Africa. The outcomes of this workshop are summarized in this document.
The (...)
Study finds that while wealthy nations advocate renewables at home, 60% of aid to African energy projects went on fossil fuels.
Wealthy governments have been accused of promoting fossil fuel development in Africa at the expense of clean energy.
Analysis showed 60% of public aid for energy (...)
The South African government wants more clarity on details related to the African Continent Free Trade Area (AfCTFA) before signing the agreement, says Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies.
Davies was speaking at a briefing on the AfCTFA in Pretoria on 26 March. He likened the agreement, in its current form, to a circuit board which was missing transistors.
The agreement is part of a plan to broaden trade across regional and economic communities and has merit, Davies explained. (...)
The economist Ndongo Samba Sylla is a former advisor to the President of the Republic of Senegal and the author of books including “The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich” and “La démocratie contre la République: l’autre histoire du gouvernement du peuple”. He tells Emergent (...)
Many African nations are mired in huge debts arising from foreign loans that have hardly benefitted the people. The citizens need to audit these debts. Odious debts should be repudiated, damn the consequences. Moreover, as Thomas Sankara demonstrated in the four years he was president of (...)
Companies listed on the London Stock Exchange control over $1trillion worth of Africa’s resources in just five commodities - oil, gold, diamonds, coal and platinum. My research for the NGO, War on Want, which has just been published, reveals that 101 companies, most of them British, control (...)
This week’s special issue takes a gloomy look at the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and their subimperialist extractive tentacles around the African continent. Social justice movements must start with a common critical analysis of the BRICS in order to intensify South to (...)
The BRICS are united in their drive for foreign direct investment, a thirst for natural resources and poor environmental regulation. A closer examination of the predatory capitalist penetration of each BRIC nation reveals multi-national companies carving up Africa in a similar way the countries (...)
AFDB The bank is touted as being a good potential host of the proposed BRICS bank. But its record so far suggests otherwise. A lack of representativeness, dubious appointments and investments, incompetence and a tendency towards privatisation have left many questioning whether the bank even (...)
In the current context of international crisis of capitalism, sub-Saharan Africa is presented as a zone of the world economy which is doing well. In 2012, none of the states in the region was considered as in recession: 0.8% growth in GDP in Swaziland, 8.7 % (after 13.7% in 2011) in Ghana, or (...)
[Second translation, corrected]. We live in a world of plenty. Today food is produced for 12,000 million people, according to the Organization of the United Nations Food and Agriculture (FAO), when the planet is inhabited by 7,000 people. There is food. So why is one of every seven people in (...)
As famine returns to East Africa, Norman Traub pins the blame on climate change and imperialist intervention.
Famine was declared in two regions of Somalia on 20th July. This occurs when acute child malnutrition exceeds 30% and more than two people of every 10,000 die each day from hunger. (...)
A renewed wave of development babble began flowing soon after the February launch of the World Bank’s ten-year Strategy document, “Africa’s Future and the World Bank’s Support to It”. Within three months, a mini-tsunami of Afro-optimism swept in: the International Monetary Fund’s Regional Economic (...)
The recent wave of Afro-optimism boasting of economical and technological growth on the continent fails to stand up under closer scrutiny, veiling the harsh reality faced by Africans today.
Apparently, “one in three Africans is middle class” and as a result, Africa is ready for “take off”, (...)
Raj Patel, Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck: Bill Gates’s fortune is funding a new Green Revolution. But is that what Africans need?
More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most (...)
We reproduce below the article of Walden Bello published in Pambazuka News, followed by to critical readers’ comments from Regina Birner and Dan Taylor.
Biofuel production is certainly one of the culprits in the current global food crisis. But while the diversion of corn from food to biofuel (...)
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