World Economy In Photos - Foreign Affairs (2) - Nairaland
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Coup Aftermath Leaves Niger Republic Economy In Tatters / One Third Of World Economy Expected To Be In Recession In 2023, Says IMF Chief / Russian Economy In ‘shock’ Over Western Sanctions, Says Kremlin (2) (3) (4)
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 5:00am On Apr 04, 2023 |
Global De-dollarization Inevitable "Also countries have succesfully developed mechanisms to carry out trade using other mediums that attenuates the need to possess the USD."Continue reading on Echo Nigeria.
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 12:58pm On Apr 04, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced:
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:37pm On Apr 04, 2023 |
Why is Zelensky persecuting Ukrainian Christians?
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 12:19pm On Apr 05, 2023 |
pansophist: 1 Like 1 Share |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 4:35am On Apr 06, 2023 |
pansophist: 1 Like 1 Share
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 12:38pm On Apr 06, 2023 |
Ikaeniyan0:South Africa has a higher GDP per capita. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita is an economic metric that breaks down a country's economic output per person. Economists use GDP per capita to determine how prosperous countries are based on their economic growth GDP per capita is calculated by dividing the GDP of a nation by its population. Mogajunior: 1 Like 1 Share
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:31pm On Apr 07, 2023 |
Belgium hit with record-high inflation. 1 Like 1 Share
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:00am On Apr 09, 2023 |
pansophist: |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by RiceProducers: 10:58am On Apr 09, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced: Russian economy is in freefall. The Rouble is crashing. Latest figures 1 Like 1 Share |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by XAUBulls: 12:01pm On Apr 10, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced: |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by XAUBulls: 12:06pm On Apr 10, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced:Insightful. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by XAUBulls: 12:15pm On Apr 10, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced: |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by XAUBulls: 12:19pm On Apr 10, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced: |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by XAUBulls: 12:24pm On Apr 10, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced:True that. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 10:33pm On Apr 17, 2023 |
Libya was the poorest country in Africa. Gaddafi made it the most prosperous country on the African continent and he was murdered.
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 1:47pm On Apr 18, 2023 |
President Putin is Sultan Mehmed II while Jewlensky is Vlad Dracula/Constatine without the valour. For those who attach any importance to the UN(I believe it's redundant and useless), the UN has ruled that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal. The UN also recognizes Taiwan as part of China but the West continues to push for Taiwan's seccession (China yet again has proven to be the smarter party while the West has been subjected to global ridicule because the actions of the West are inconsistent in Ukraine it made futile attempts to deny the democratic will of the people of Ukraine as they chose to secede/join Russia). The West likes to preach, lecture and dictate but it doesn't practice it's sermons. Any declaration of independence by Taiwan (a province of China) would lay the groundwork for China to restore order by any means it chooses. Every day, I pray to God and I thank God for Russia and China because a world with just the tyrannical crooked West would be unbearable for the colonized and oppressed.
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 1:56pm On Apr 18, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced:Who are the colonized and oppressed? Find out here Colonialism is alive and well in Africa, but goes by many nice names https://roape.net/2022/01/26/colonialism-is-alive-and-well-in-africa-but-goes-by-many-nice-names/
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 8:04pm On Apr 18, 2023 |
Russia-India trade outpaced predictions Mutual turnover has reached $45 billion, India’s foreign minister has announced. India and Russia have seen massive growth in bilateral trade over the past year, rapidly outpacing the goals initially set by the two countries, according to the Indian Minister of External Affairs. The trade turnover between the nations touched $45 billion between April 2022 and February 2023, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar announced on Monday at a Russia-India business-dialog meeting in New Delhi. Russia has also become India’s top supplier of crude, after Moscow rerouted its energy supplies away from Western countries in response to sanctions, embargoes and price caps. Over the past few months, the nations have been ditching the US dollar in trade, with most deals settled in other currencies, such as the Russian ruble, Indian rupee, and the UAE dirham, according to oil-trading and banking sources.
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:39am On Apr 19, 2023 |
The New Intellectuals of Empire July 1, 2021 By Yusuf Serunkuma It has become increasingly common for scholars, activists and politicians who see Africa from African vantage points to be outraged by neo-orientalist portrayals of Africa by activist-scholars and media from the west. By ‘African vantage points’, I mean that they tend to explain and offer context to the well-publicised crimes of Africa’s leaders as opposed to calling them out and campaigning for sanctions and intervention from the benevolent west. I mean, whilst they would be critical of Muammar Gaddafi or Robert Mugabe, they are unwilling to support coalitions of the so-called ’vanguards of justice and human rights’ to flush these bad leaders out, even if flushing them out comes by way of sanctions. These scholars and activists are my main audience in this essay – because I claim to be one of them. It is my contention that we need to be kinder to the West’s celebrity-missionary intellectuals and media. They commit no crime when they ’misrepresent’ the continent. In fact, misrepresentation as a term does not even apply to them as, indeed, they are not mispresenting anything but simply doing their job – which is mainly writing for and informing their home audiences on how to see Africa, which remains an abundant wild reserve for game and exploitation. It would be liberating for the African activist and scholar to beware that over 95 per cent of academics, mainstream media outlets such as the BBC and CNN, and the myriad commentors including bloggers, columnists, and overly sanctimonious tweeps on Africa from the West will — oftentimes involuntarily, instinctively or by association — follow the foreign policy positions of their countries. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:44am On Apr 19, 2023 |
So, Michela Wrong, Nic Cheeseman, Robert Guest and many others remain intellectuals of empire. But with a sophistication; they are not crude like their predecessors (such as the colonial anthropologists and explorers who were, among other things, openly racist and abusive). This new breed of missionary-scholar speaks to the visible wrongs and actual abuses by African leaders, but they hardly ever offer any context, longue durée, causation, and abstraction. They treated their subjects as exotic and geographically contained with neither global-local connections, nor power games with the new colonial powers etcetera. Indeed, these outright half-analyses have been used quite successfully to even conscript disciples from amongst us. You will constantly hear African university graduates chanting tired buzz words about democracy, free market economies, the need to attract foreign investments, praising IMF and World Bank data, and congratulating themself after more aid is released. They’ll then focus on small and obsolete campaigns such as decolonisation, demand reparations to appear cool and sophisticated. All this is the work of the new breed of the intellectuals of empire, which is more tactical, more sophisticated, but as dangerous as their predecessors. Reflecting on Wrong’s recent book, Do Not Disturb, Jörg Wiegratz and Leo Zeilig have reminded us about the timeless trope of monsters in Western media and academia in reference to African ‘autocratic‘ presidents. It is worth stressing that presidents that are labelled ’monsters’ are not necessarily innocent individuals; they are and have actually committed crimes to fit the label. But while their badness ought not to be denied, it has to be understood as a timeless fact of all politicians: their monstrosity ought to be understood as a function of power – so the truism that ‘power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely’ – and this is not limited to Africa. In truth though, those characterised as monsters across formerly colonised places have been men [and women] unwilling to allow modern imperial plunder disguised as free trade and often packaged in the slick language of human rights. Please note that monsters do not begin as monsters in both their political character, and the ways in which the world sees and writes about them. Frequently, they simply undergo a key turn, which often happens at that sobering moment of encounter with the imperial capitalist machine. Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek has described this moment, as a ‘key dilemma’ for any president seeking to champion the lives of the wretched of the earth under a corrosive capitalist modernity. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:47am On Apr 19, 2023 |
Ugandan president Idi Amin started out as a darling of the West. But he became a monster as soon as he chose to get the natives out of the backwaters of the economy, which actually meant taking the economy away from the Indian-Asians(Awon eyan Rishi Sunak), the ‘deputies of colonialists’ as historian Lwanga-Lunyiigo called them.[1] After Amin radically pulled the rag from under their feet — as Kenya and Tanzania had done using their legal systems — Uganda’s former colonisers who had actually shipped Indians into the region and deliberately privileged them over the natives, were the first to demonise Amin labelling him an autocrat, a monster. Once politically ‘bad’, Amin also became bad in the scholarship and media coverage. Most famously, he became a ’white pumpkin’ in popular media circles. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:56am On Apr 19, 2023 |
Elizabeth II bestowed a knighthood on President Mugabe, which was clearly a subtle bribe to get him to ignore land reforms, a burning issue at independence in 1980. For 20 years, Mugabe remained a darling of the West, never antagonising white farmers and instead, becoming ensnared in endless negotiations with them and the UK government to find a less radical or less painful way to allow them to keep their colonial loot. Even when the British government gave Mugabe money to buy land for redistribution, the white landowners refused to sell. Caving into pressure in the late 1990s from inside his own party and from former combatants, Mugabe then took a hard stance on land. Shamelessly, Zimbabwe’s former colonisers took back their bribe, and the media and academia competed in badmouthing Mugabe. On the heels of UK government sanctions, were tons of monsterizing scholarship and media coverage. In nearby South Africa, the gift for his political-economic naivety was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Nelson Mandela which was working wonders. Mandela admitted in his memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, that he had blatantly defied the ANC’s resolutions in his ignorant and childlike pursuit of political independence. In effect, he left South Africa’s entire economy in the hands of white South Africans. As Zizek puts it, if Mandela had really won, he would never have become a darling of the West — and of the world. Similarly, before Kagame started taking a hard stance towards the West, he had been their darling for years. He is now their monster. (Published on July 1, 2021.) Ever wondered why with all Museveni’s crimes, he is yet to become a monster? Well, Museveni is in Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo – doing mercenary work for the western democracy merchandising imperialists. He is providing the calm under which foreign mining companies enjoy Congolese resources, and also providing the environment under which European pirates enjoy Somalia’s marine resources. Thus, despite his well-documented crimes on Ugandans, he is yet to make the label, a monster. The point I am making here is that a huge percentage of scholarship and media in the West reflects the foreign policies of their states. This is true not just in the so-called “formerly colonised” places, but it is also true of Europe’s and America’s relations across the world where their exploitative tentacles are being resisted. Mainstream scholarship, and media, which is largely ‘a bunch of frauds’ as Noam Chomsky puts it, will often find the ‘ethical imperative’ to blast leaderships in Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, China, and even helpless Palestine — as long as their multinationals face stiff opposition attempting to monopolise the economies of these countries. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 3:10am On Apr 19, 2023 |
BidenDTrounced: The crime of the leaderships of these countries is trying to extract maximum benefit from their mineral resources — especially oil, gold, lithium and platinum — and fighting for their land. As these leaders are derided by EU and American politicians, western scholars and journalists endlessly chant their badness. These same scholars and media also sweat blood and tears to ensure that the crimes of empire are not exposed. Ali Mazrui told us as much in 1997 when the BBC censored him for reporting factually about Muammar Gaddafi. More recently, The Conversation killed a well-researched piece by Matthew Alford on how ’western media rationalises and amplifies state-sanctioned violence and wars as millions die.’ Please note that these fellows in the Western-based media and academia hate being associated with their countries’ foreign policies. They will vehemently deny this accusation. They strut themselves around as independent objective academics and analysts building their craft purely on fieldwork and theory. This is rightly undeniable but to a degree. There are two glaring handicaps with their claim: first, you’ll never hear them speak out against the crimes of their own countries the way they do about those of other countries or their leaders. You do not see them calling out Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. You do not see them joining Black Lives Matter, nor see them call out the wars in Yemen, Iraq, and the entire Middle East that were started on absolute deception. And this isn’t a case of disciplinary focus or areas studies. That would be a clumsy excuse. A true activist-scholar has to start by calling out the crimes of own countries. Sadly, you have heard them downplay the double standards of structural adjustment, or simply remain silent. They are happy to harp on about democracy and human rights as if there is no connection between livelihood and governance. It is as if they do not see the continued ruins of structural adjustment as local African populations remain disempowered and emasculated – and the double standards with which Europe and North America still enforce the Washington Consensus onto Africa as they themselves do the exact opposite at home. Second, and this is an important point I intend to make: working or simply following the foreign policy positions of their countries cannot be seen as a crime on the part of these activist-scholars and media. They really have no choice. Even those most aware of their positionality in this game – by far the fewest – end up with very limited choices. To appropriate David Scott, they did not choose to do this job, they were simply conscripted. They did not choose to work for their countries as earlier intellectuals of empire did. To survive as scholars, they have to stay true to the mission of the master who not only introduced them to these parts of the world, but who also enables their intellectual and financial power to undertake scholarship in these parts of the world. That the majority are unaware of or simply deny their conscription to the imperial machine is how it is meant to be. This is because the conscription is more discreet and takes many subtle forms including their training, funding, legitimation by their schools, historical connections, etc. This is an existential dilemma. Just one telling example, there are exponentially more scholars from the UK than from France or Germany working in the former British colonies, in the same way that there are more scholars from France than from the UK in the former French colonies. And although this form of conscription runs deep, it remains not just largely invisible but unconsciously suppressed. Should it be strange that there are almost zero scholars from the colonies doing fieldwork in Europe and North America. To this day, it is still viewed as almost comical that an African university started a centre for the study of the Americas. The bigger point I wish to make is this: scholarship is closely linked to the economy—and to politics. Until Africans develop their economies to fund their own scholarship, these men and women from the west will continue to say whatever they want – and there will always be good evidence to back up any arguments they choose to make, which actually makes their scholarship appear sound and objective. But as Foucault has told us, to focus on a particular argument or focus on a particular subject is often a political position and not an intellectual one. It is not intellectual persuasion or a case of overwhelming evidence. It is power and politics. My intention is not to make the conscription of Western media and scholars at the service of their countries’ foreign policies a crime (though perhaps if they acknowledged this fact, they would be humbler and less sanctimonious). It is to remind African intellectuals and activists that there is a need to spend more time fighting at home to better their politics and economies. This, in turn, will give them the intellectual and political power to also push our side of the story – which will also be, as Nigerian historian Yusufu Bala Usman would put it, a political position. https://roape.net/2021/07/01/the-new-intellectuals-of-empire/ |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 1:48pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
Colonialism is alive and well in Africa, but goes by many nice names Yusuf Serunkuma asks how the continued and violent colonisation of the continent has not been more systematically resisted. In a long-read, Serunkuma looks at the extraordinary control of the continent, from banking, the coffee trade, land grabs and mining. Why have Africans failed to see these forms of foreign control as ‘colonial,’ in which former colonisers have continued the pillage of the continent? (it's because they're dumb and they get an orgasm from being oppressed and inferior). By Yusuf Serunkuma With all the evidence in our midst—foreign monopolies in mining, banking, coffee trade, humongous profit expropriation, policy double-standards, direct foreign aggression such as foreign capital land grabs, and violent aggressions as witnessed in Somalia and Libya, endless captive debt and so-called aid—why have Africans failed to stage committed resistance [intellectual, cultural or even military] against the ongoing pillage? Most of this championed through the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) whose ruins on the continent have been acknowledged as visible everywhere, why have Africans refused to resist this pillage with their lives as their grandparents’ resisted colonies and protectorates? Asked differently: how did “former” colonisers so successfully and quickly manage to re-colonise newly independent states—as early as just 30 years after independence—that is, re-monopolise cash and food crop trade, and continue the aggressive violent extraction of Africa’s natural resources without attracting the ire of Africans? Or why have Africans failed to see structural adjustment as ‘colonial adjustment,’ as new ways in which yesterday’s colonisers returned to continue the pillage of the continent? By demonstrating that structural adjustment programmes – with examples in banking, coffee trade, and mining – actually embody and display all the ugly features of the past colonial projects, this long-read argues that (a) the technocratization of pillage has so successfully disguised the exploitative nature of the power relations giving it a hue of benevolence and mutually observable interests. Africa’s eternal colonisers took off their khaki uniforms for suits, and replaced missionaries with diplomats who, instead of chanting Christianity and civilisation, are now vending democracy, human rights, and free market economics. (b) Reminiscent of the colonialism of old, in addition to violent and structural enforcement, new colonialism has conscripted both willing and unsuspecting compradors across the continent. These have been organised into sophisticated elite networks and are more handsomely [directly and indirectly] remunerated than the earlier group of compradors. These range from heads of states, mid-level politicians, and senior public servants. Others include Europeanised folks in the NGO and civil society sectors whose cosmetic work on the African continent simply benefits the workers than their claimed target groups. Against technocratization and conscription of compradors including local elites, it is common to find expectedly “woke folks” in the west—activists, journalists and scholars—not simply dismissive of the colonial nature of structural adjustment programmes, but also ignorant of the facts to the point that they are unaware of their own conscription to a newer and uglier version of colonial control. In an earlier essay on roape.net, I have called these folks, ‘the new intellectuals of empire.’ https://www.nairaland.com/7632986/world-economy-photos/1#122606758 Thus, this clearly more lethal wave of colonialism remains invisible – with several fancy names – and has thus failed in generate the ire from Africans, and sympathy from genuine hearts in Europe and North America for whom colonisation of the continent continues in their name. https://roape.net/2022/01/26/colonialism-is-alive-and-well-in-africa-but-goes-by-many-nice-names/ |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 1:57pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
Most profitable banks in the world There are 24 commercial banks in Uganda. In the year 2019, the aggregate net-after-tax profit for those banks was USH807.5 billion (about $215m). Of the 24 banks, only three are locally owned. That is, with over 50 percent local shareholding: Centenary Bank, Housing Finance, and Post Bank. Of these three, only Centenary has noticeable visibility in the market; the other two are very minor players with limited visibility. With the remaining 21 owned mostly by South African and British, often white capitalists, that humongous amount of profit money leaves Uganda every year. Profit expropriation is easy in Uganda with the 2020 estimates showing that USH528 billion (about, $144m) left the country. This is 72 per cent of banking, net-after-tax profits that live the country annually. Picture this: a story published by The Economist in 2020 – with closer focus on Uganda – noted that “Africa’s banks are the most profitable in the world while also being the least effective.” With interest rates ranging between 12-30%, these banks, The Economist noted, make over 17% returns on equity for shareholders. So, what type of businesspersons borrow, thrive and pay off these loans – in an economy as small as $36 billion? In truth, what The Economist did not say was that these inefficient banks were actually, in many ways, a bunch of thieves, disguised as bankers. The trick is, the lender lends while fully aware that you’ll not make any success with the borrowed monies, instead, the bank will keep you in a cycle of debt while they take all of your labours and any profits in the interests. But most importantly, they are looking at your collateral, which they will also take. Because no one borrows money at that interest rate, invests it and repays their loans back—and also makes profit to thrive as a business. Only thieves or friends of government – not paying taxes or working on government tenders – can actually make a profit on such exorbitant interest rates. Sadly, these bankers are not embarrassed to reproduce colonialist stereotypes as justification for the interest rates.
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:01pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
[quote=BigBallsBiden]"Corruption as it is is a legacy of Western colonialism. After years of looting, stealing, maiming and brigandage, the West was able to create a 'garden' for themselves." Origins of Corruption In Africa Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu Transparency International has defined corruption as “the abuse of power for private gains.” Corruption can occur in several forms, but this paper focuses on what Hellman and Jones call ‘administrative corruption’, or the use of “private payments to public officials to distort the prescribed implementation of official rules and policies.” When specifically viewed with Africa’s history in mind, administrative corruption, thought rampant across Africa today is an alien culture. Pre-colonial Africa, for the most part, was founded on strong ethical values sometimes packaged in spiritual terms, but with the end result of ensuring social justice and compliance. It's a long read. I don't just want to copy and paste, I want to highlight some focal points that resonates with you but my eyes are tired now. I know say you no send me ;-D...but, my people perish for lack of knowledge. Someone has to do it because we're all in this together. https://panafricanreview.rw/origins-of-corruption-in-africa/ [/quote] [quote=BigBallsBiden]Colonialism introduced systemic corruption on a grand scale across much of sub-Saharan Africa. The repudiation of indigenous values, standards, checks and balances and the pretensions of superimposing western structures destabilized the well-run bureaucratic machinery previously in existence across pre-colonial Africa. The end result is what is rampant across Africa today; conspicuous consumption, absence of loyalty to the state, oppressive and corrupt state institutions, to mention few.[/quote]. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:03pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
By the way, it's dated Jan 2022.
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| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:05pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
Creaming Africa’s Coffee Uganda ranks as one of the world’s leading producers of coffee producing over 5 million bags [each of 60kgs] of beans in the year 2019. Coffee remains a major foreign exchange earner in Uganda bringing USH1.8 trillion, that is, $494m in the financial year 2019-2020. This made it Uganda’s number one forex earner. But while these figures look awesome, the money, despite being counted in Uganda, does not end in the hands of Ugandans farmers and businessmen. But rather traders and big conglomerates in the UK, Switzerland and Germany among others. The Ugandan, Ethiopian, Kenyan coffee farmer remains as exploited as his grandparents during the colonial period. Political economists, Jörg Wiegratz (2016) and Karin Wedig (2019) have documented the quagmire in which the local farmers are trapped after structural Adjustment in the late 1980. Using terms such as “fraud,” “cheating,” “theft,” “deception” as empirical tools, Wiegratz has showed the farmer as an endangered species cheated for sport by middlemen in the absence of powerful negotiating unit which were once provided by cooperatives. With majority coffee farmers being rural and often uneducated small-scale folks, the cooperative often negotiated prices on their behalf. Dismantled by free markets, they are cheated with impunity. While Wedig disagrees that cooperatives were ever dismantled – focusing on recently created dilutions of cooperatives such as Gumutindo – she too, acknowledges the conditioning limits in which both farmers and the present cooperatives operate. I came of age after SAPs (structural adjustment programmes) had just been imposed onto the continent, and cooperatives were dying out across Uganda. But I vividly recall coffee growers’ unions—a local extension of cooperatives—spread across the countryside helping local farmers thrive. The colonial government had, specifically, favoured Indian monopolists, and had worked so hard to make sure farmers remained disunited and lacked a single bargaining voice. This barrier had been successfully dismantled with the enactment of the Coffee Industry Ordinance in 1952. This allowed Native cooperatives to thrive having been denied operational licenses since 1908 which saw many natives die fighting to cooperate. Local Growers’ Unions had village offices, big storage facilities, and cemented yards where farmers collectively dried their coffee beans. Small scale farmers using mostly family labour would harvest their coffee, and use a bicycle or carry it on their heads to the nearest grower’s union yards and stores. The prices had been fixed for the benefit of the farmer. Since Uganda Coffee Marketing Board (UCMB) had negotiated the price for the beans, there were no middlemen to cheat the farmers, and prices never depended on seasons. If they did, the UCMB would pass the message down the chain. Over and above negotiating good prices, the cooperatives and growers’ unions ensured that farmers received additional services, including farm equipment, training, seedlings and veterinary support. During bad weather, storage facilities were offered. Lorries branded, “FOR EXPORT” or “COOPERATIVES” often traversed villages collecting farmer’s produce. The Uganda Commercial Bank (UCB) offered big and small loans to farmers—alongside grower’s unions—to help them meet their immediate needs ncluding sustaining their families and paying school fees, medical bills. Can you imagine UCB was giving farmers up to 90 per cent of capital costs to cooperatives to buy ginneries of their own? The 1950s-1980s were good times before structural adjustment took hold. Together, the farmers were enabled with a voice to demand representation at the national stage. Then structural adjustment came and crushed this down. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:12pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
Presently, with the dismantling of nationally supported and bottom-up cooperatives, coffee farmers do not have any locally-invested voice on the international market, as UCMB did. Prices are determined by the so-called market forces of “demand and supply”—and all their fetishized violence. When the books say $490m were earned in a particular year, over 60 per cent of that money ends in the pocket of local barons and British and Indian middle-men. These middle-men have also set up shops and farms in Uganda and are, sadly, part of the local count. (the Indian middle men are Rishi Sunak's people...I have no problem with Indians generally, some Indians were only pawns in the scheming of the West and these few Indians were influenced by the West just as we have some black 'middle men'. I'm more concerned with the root causes of this behavior, it is a legacy of Western colonialism). African Business reported that the biggest players include, “Kyagalanyi Coffee…which later became Volcafe group, the coffee division of ED&F Man, a commodities trader headquartered in London. Other big players include a subsidiary of Sucafina, a Swiss trading firm, and Olam, a commodities giant from Singapore.” Others include Neumann Gruppe with farms and large tracts of land in Mubende district in the central region, and Twin Trading, which is a UK coffee trading company. These use their local offices to earn money—audited as earned by Ugandans—but quickly returned to Europe – just as colonialism did. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:12pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
But there is more: if Ugandan coffee ever fetched $490m into the Ugandan economy—which ends in UK and German companies with local offices in Uganda—the same beans brought $3.4billion into the Swiss or Germany economy. In a ground-breaking essay, Angers Elsby showed us how a bag coffee grown in Uganda, Ethiopia or Ivory Coast, Europe earns from the same bag seven times more. Elsby has written that, “between 2000 and 2010, Ethiopia, Uganda and Cote D’Ivoire received an average of $138, $71 and $68 per bag of coffee exported, respectively. Switzerland, Europe’s most profitable coffee re-exporter, earned over $700 per bag.” And this is not because African countries are unable to “add value” but rather that the politics of assessing value addition are inherently flawed to favour western multinationals. Elsby notes that policies implemented by European states during the 1980s and 1990s – accompanying structural adjustment – “dramatically restructured global commodity markets in their favour of Europe and artificially inflated the international competitiveness of their commodity trading and processing industries”. In truth, this so-called competitiveness, Elsby demonstrates, does not stand much on value-additional claims but rather “value capture” by Europe, a thing entirely dependent on political or state power. Not economics. Value capture, and claims of value addition is the new language of exploitation. But what more value would be there beyond making the bean available, beyond farming this bean? |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:14pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
From Leopold II to King Gertler In his seminal book, King Leopold’s Ghost: [b]A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild tells the story of an official, Edmund Dene Morel from shipping company Elder Dempster which was based in Liverpool. Morel championed the campaigns to end the late phases of slave trade under King Leopold II, something he followed up on by sheer intuition and instinct. It was about 1897, when, on one of his occasional supervisory trips at the Belgian port of Antwerp, Edmund Morel noticed something unsettling about the ships loading and unloading goods to and from the Congo: At the docks of the big port of Antwerp he sees his company’s ships arriving filled to the hatch covers with valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. But when they cast off their hawsers to steam back to the Congo, while military bands play on the pier and eager young men in uniform line the ships’ rails, what they carry is mostly army officers, firearms, and ammunition. There is no trade going on here. Little or nothing is being exchanged for the rubber and ivory. As Morel watches these riches streaming to Europe with almost no goods being sent to Africa to pay for them, he realizes that there can be only one explanation for their source: slave labor. Indeed, there was slave trade, and Morel would go on to champion a major human rights movement against King Leopold II in the years that followed. Among the other activists that Morel inspired was the well-known satirist and novelist Mark Twain. In one of his epistles, Mark Twain noted that when he participated in the anti-slave movement that Morel had inspired, “in the Congo, a practice [Slave trade] had taken eight to ten million lives.” Reading this figure, Hochschild was startled: He noted: Statistics about mass murder are often hard to prove. But if this number turned out to be even half as high… the Congo would have been one of the major killing grounds of modern times. Why were these deaths not mentioned in the standard litany of our century’s horrors? There are three things I want to highlight from this section of the story of King Leopold II and his crimes in Congo. The first is that if he ever returned anything to the Congo for the rubber and ivory he pillaged, it was weapons and soldiers. Not more goods. Secondly, his actions directly led to millions of deaths as Mark Twain noted. If they were not directly killed and maimed as punishment for not fulfilling the quotas of wild rubber demanded, they died from the conditions that the Leopold enterprise put in place. Conservative estimates have put the numbers at 10 million people. (i have no sympathy for the dead Nazis/westerners and so called JEWS in Ukraine..more will die..more must die) The third point, and perhaps most important for this essay, is that the template that Leopold used has never been thrown away. It has simply been revised over the successive years, to become more disguised but it remains as lethal as before. To make that case more succinctly, I will tell the story of Leopold’s later replacement: King Dan Gertler. Considered the richest or one of the richest men in Israel, Dan Gertler’s empire has been built off Congolese natural resources and like Leopold, leaving many dead bodies in his wake. With monopolistic rights over almost all the mining sites in the Democratic Republic Congo, Gertler is the absolute embodiment of the colonialism of the so-called free-markets – that were ushered in by structural adjustment. Gertler enjoys near-monopoly rights in Congo’s diamond, copper, cobalt and gold trade, which he attained only dubiously. Recently, western media was awash with his corruption scandals, in which he allegedly gave out $100m of bribes to acquire this monopoly status. Interestingly, the script involves direct voices and footprints of the American presidents from George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Joseph Biden. Sadly, not narrativized as colonialism, but in the beautiful language as a contention over a “trading licence.” The state of Israel appears only on the side-lines. But why would the story of a single businessman – interacting in a free market economy – directly implicate presidents and states? Because there are no businessmen of this size without the violence of their states. These license scandals notwithstanding, in 2020, Bloomberg reported that Gertler would be getting richer over his Congolese possessions after entering trade agreements with Tesla’s Elon Musk. |
| Re: World Economy In Photos by BidenDTrounced: 2:16pm On Apr 19, 2023 |
Having reached the DRC in 1997, the BBC reported, Gertler’s breakthrough came during the 2000 civil war in DR Congo which “risked ending Kabila’s reign as suddenly as it had begun.” Arguably with the support of the Israel government, “Gertler promised millions of dollars and, according to a United Nations report, access to arms.” Emphasis added. In the spirit of states propping their capitalist exploiters of the African wild—disguised as individuals on free trade projects—this access to arms would only be guaranteed by his state. Gertler delivered on his promise of arms according to a UN report cited in the New York Times. In return, Gertler “received a monopoly on DR Congo’s substantial diamond exports,” and “diamonds would be exchanged for money, weapons and military training.” The mention of military training should signal us to the ways in which state-driven, war-driven capitalism reproduces itself: works with the state. No wonder, when Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001, Gertler had “gained the trust of the younger Kabila” who went on to become president, and with him, Gertler was guaranteed more success. Just 47 years of age, Gertler is believed to the richest man in Israel with major investments across Tel-Aviv – not Kinshasa. King Leopold built Belgium through his proceeds from Kongo – not Kongo. |
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