A child breaks stones
Click here to view BBC programme transcript Click here to view 'Boycott World Bank Bonds' campaign 'Ghana' was once hailed by the World Bank as a showcase for its policies. Today, after two decades of financial "discipline" the majority of Ghanaians are worse off than before. John Kampfner has been to Ghana tracing the roots of the growing protest movement. My life is full of shame Click here to view the Guardian/Yahoo report Mary Agyekum breaks stones for a living. Small flint hammer in hand, she sits on the parched ground under the sun, chipping away at boulders. Usually some of her six young children help her out. They take it in turns to go to school, because each day's tuition costs money. If lucky, Mary takes home 20,000 cedis a week - that's £2 (in 2001 Ed.). A fundamentalist economy Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign To coin a phrase from arch hypocrite "Tony" Blair, the dysfunctional state of Ghana is "a scar on the conscience of the world". The first sub-Saharan country to gain independence, it should not be a case study in poverty and it certainly would not be if free to develop unencumbered by acquired aid dependence syndrome and all of the ills that flow from it. When the experiment in neo-liberal/neo-colonial economic theory began, 'Ghana' was hailed as a "model pupil". But after two decades of IMF and World Bank "structural adjustment", the poor are poorer and the government is more dependent than ever on outside help known as 'aid'. 'Ghana' is a "cash and carry" society. Nothing comes free. You pay for health care, you pay for education; you pay for clean drinking water and sanitation. Over the past few years, the international institutions and 'donor' governments like Britain have begun to talk of change, but in the villages the same fundamentalist rules are being applied with the same pernicious rigour. A family pays Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign The Agyekum family are forced to make trade-offs every day. Each morning begins with a trip to the town's public toilet, a concrete edifice recognisable from far away by the smell. Outside a woman sits in a booth, ready to take 100 cedis (in 2001) from each person. If Mary has run out of money, she begs the woman to allow her to take her children in for free.
They then walk to the nearest borehole where they pay 250 cedis (in 2001) for a bucket of water. They can afford perhaps four buckets a day, for washing, cooking and drinking. That leaves perhaps £1 (in 2001) a week for food and a trip a week to school. It is no surprise that illiteracy rate is plummeting and drop out rates are increasing. "My life is full of shame," Mary Agyekum says. "My heavy load of stones gives me a headache, a pain in my neck and back, cuts on my fingers. I have difficulty breathing. The two children I still try to send to school are often chased home by the teachers if I haven't paid the fee on time." Resentfulness grows Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Even the practitioners admit things have gone wrong, and that trouble is brewing.
I met Peter Harrold, the World Bank's representative in Ghana shortly after the attacks in New York and Washington. He identified a link between poverty, frustration and terrorism. "There's a serious danger. The North is getting richer and the South getting poorer, or at least making minute progress," he says. "The disparities cannot continue going on in this way." There is misguided genuine regard in 'Ghana' for Britain, the former colonial power, and for the United States. Union jack and stars and stripes bumper stickers are ubiquitous. But there is a strong sense of injustice that is now being marshalled into political opposition against western financial institutions. Click here to view the Guardian/Yahoo report "Anybody who has seen the images of those terrible events would have condemned them as senseless," says Yao Graham, coordinator of Third World Network, an NGO based in 'Ghana'. "But we're living in a world where so many people are feeling taken for granted that unless the big powers become more sensitive to the demands of weaker countries, all of us are endangered." Even water is a commodity Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Meanwhile, there is a new plan to sell off water in 'Ghana', a plan which local campaigners say is disastrous. As in Britain, officials in 'Ghana' have become wary of using the word privatisation. They prefer to call it "private-public partnerships". The World Bank is supporting the sell-off to the tune of $100m. Why, people wonder, must water be self-financing in poor countries, while in the US for example billions of dollars of state money support the industry? The unprofitable rural water supply will stay in state hands, but local communities now have to make a five to ten per cent down-payment for the "privilege" of installing clean pumps and raise the cash for their maintenance. In villages where people earn less than $1 a day the system quickly collapses. Still, the experiment is seen by the IMF and World Bank as a template for utility sell-offs across the developing world. And there is a growing sense that what wealth there is in Ghana, is not benefiting its people. Gold is of no value Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Gold is Ghana's biggest export earner. For decades the mining firms have had a free rein. The government, urged on by those in control of the supply of 'aid', gives them tax "holidays" of up to ten years and keeps environmental and other regulation to a minimum.
Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Today gold spells trouble and poverty Two thirds of all 'Ghanaian' land is under concessions. Everywhere you go, you see huge cavities in the ground, discarded pits where thriving villages once stood and where nothing now grows. In the village of Dumasi, a Canadian-owned and British-managed mining company has been blasting in an open cast pit less than 100 metres away. Flying rocks have damaged huts. People have been forced off their farming land, losing their only source of income. Compensation is derisory. They fear their homes are next. The community holds public meetings and sends petitions. "To be sitting on gold, people might before have envied you," Graham told villagers at one such rally. "But today gold spells trouble and poverty." Healthcare is unaffordable Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign At the hospital in the regional centre of Tarkwa, I discussed money with Dr Ebenezer Acquah, the Principal Medical Officer, as we walked through a ward with cholera and post-natal patients lying close to each other on the floor.
Patients have to pay for each visit and for the costs of any surgery - gloves, drugs, blood, anaesthetics, gauze, cotton wool. They're not released if they don't pay. If they die, their bodies aren't released until relatives find the cash - all this in an area where multi-national mining companies are making billions. "Sometimes you lose patients not because you lack skill to save them, but because the equipment doesn't exist," says Dr Acquah. "Sometimes the frustration is overwhelming, but you do what you can." Change is needed Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign At the IMF and World Bank, the language is hideously Orwellian Blairisms. The talk is of "listening" and "holistic approaches". The "Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative" (HIPC) is supposed to relieve countries like 'Ghana' of much of the external debt run up by crony capitalist crookery. But it comes with the usual subversive strings attached. All loans and write-offs are based on "conditionality" - and privatisation (aka 'buying' for peanuts) of utilities is one of those conditions - effectively 'aid' is the vehicle that enables transfer of ownership from the people, of their natural resources, to neo-colonials and their quislings. "Structural adjustment" has been cynically replaced by "poverty reduction strategies" (to deal with poverty created by suppression/corruption of education systems and any other form of indigenous development unpolluted by 'aid' dependence). In other words the recipe remains the same. There is much work to be done including the dismantling of a hopelessly dysfunctional artificial neo-colonial state and its replacement by mono-ethnic/mono-cultural states capable of throwing the pernicious World Bank et al and all of their sociopathic influences into the sea. . If you would like to help. Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Wassa Association of Communities Affected By Mining (WACAM) WACAM is a Ghanaian grassroots organisation which campaigns on behalf of communities which have been adversely affected by the gold mining activities in the region. They tackle the problems created when communities are moved off their land by mining companies, as well as the problems of those forced to live in close proximity of a mine. These issues range from loss of land and livelihood, through pollution of water sources and land, increased poverty and lack of access to schooling and health care, to beatings and killings. The WACAM activists are among the most inspiring people we met in Ghana. They do very solid social and campaign work, something most of them have devoted their entire lives to with incredible passion. They expect and receive no payment for their extraordinary efforts, which they juggle with full-time jobs to sustain themselves. The organisation has little access to funding; their only assets are a telephone and a typewriter. Any donations would make a great difference to the amount of help they can give to people whose lives have been destroyed by mining. You can contact WACAM at: WACAM, Tel:+ 233 362 20137 or + 233 22 200585 , email: kowus75@yahoo.com Click here to view Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign 'Ghana' was the first place in sub-Saharan Africa where Europeans arrived to trade - first in gold, later in slaves. It was also the first 'black' African nation to become independent. Ghana enjoys double the per capita output of poorer countries in the region, yet the income of its citizens is among the lowest in the world. Like its neighbours, Ghana's post-independence history has been one of political and economic decline. Despite being rich in mineral and human resources, and being initially endowed with a good education system and efficient civil service, Ghana fell victim to corruption and mismanagement soon after independence in 1957. In 1966, its first president and pan-African hero, Kwame Nkrumah, was deposed in a coup. In 1981, Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings staged his second coup. In April 1992 a constitution allowing for a multiparty system was approved in a referendum, ushering in a period of pseudo-democracy. Although Ghana has largely escaped the civil strife that has plagued other West African countries, in 1994-95 land disputes in the north erupted into ethnic violence. This resulted in the deaths of 1,000 people and the displacement of a further 150,000. Click here to view the Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Click here to view the Guardian/Yahoo report How is this allowed to misrepresent reality to the world? It isn't difficult. Neo-colonials need only grant one or two of the ruling elite a lucrative service monopoly to a handful of strategically positioned quislings (supply of mining engineering equipment for example, in the tradition of the white cement monopoly that was enjoyed by a wife of a head of state during his reign at castle Osu). Then to make double sure that nothing will develop to compete effectively with the dead wood, unscrupulous sociopaths and usual layer of beneficiaries of acquired 'aid' dependence syndrome in any society, who are usually recruited, you stuff the local technical university and polytechnic with strategically positioned stooges to subvert evolution of a critical mass of skills like that fuelling and driving India's economic progress. Finally you get the 'special' branch of the state's 'security' police to both protect the tentacles of subversion and to preserve the political correctitude of their populations. Outcome - stagnation while the proteges of neo-colonial crony capitalism with their numerous their wives and offspring grow fat and the people endure deprivation and exploitation like a hard of animals. Click here to view the Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Click here to view the Guardian/Yahoo report And by the way, if you can't take the word of this writer, or can't 'get head around' concepts discussed here and here, then consider the words of the visionary Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) - words that fuelled the coup that drove him out of office and catapulted 'Ghana' into a spiral of decline into cultivated dependence on subversive ''aid', from which it will not be allowed to and cannot recover, because it lacks the social/cultural cohesion and bonds that a nation such as an educated monocultural Asante nation of developed people could have under appropriate leadership. Remember when you read him that he was also speaking in an age before the ubiquitous internet and a host of applications of computing technologies that have radically changed ordinary people's ability to acquire knowledge and skills. Never before has the old saying that "knowledge is power", been more true - that's why Nkrumah didn't mention developed humans as a society's most valuable potential capital asset. If you must, then instead of heeding Nkrumah, internalise the evocative words spoken by arch hypocrite "Tony" Blair in a scripted speech : "people are born with talent and everywhere it is in chains ". "Although most Africans are poor, our continent is extremely rich. Our mineral resources, which are being exploited with foreign capital only to enrich foreign investors, range from gold and diamonds to uranium and petroleum. Our forests contain the finest woods to be grown anywhere. Our cash crops include cocoa, coffee, rubber, tobacco and cotton. As for power, which is an important factor in any economic development, Africa contains over 40% of the potential water power of the world, as compared with about 10% in Europe and 13% in North America. Yet so far, less than 1% has been developed. This is one of the reasons why we have in Africa the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, and scarcity in the midst of abundance." Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) Click here to view the Boycott World Bank Bonds campaign Click here to view the Guardian/Yahoo report
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