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In the middle of the Young African Thought .

POVERTY IN AFRICA: A PASSIONATE PILGRIMAGE TO HELL.14th JANUARY 2006 
 
On the 10th of December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This historic document was meant to serve as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in recognition of the  
inherent dignity, equal and inalienable rights of the human family. Article 25 of this fundamental tool clearly states, “Everyone has the right to a standard 
of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and the necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control…”  
 
Despite the peacetime consultations, agreements and conventions of the yesteryears, the faith of the African lot and their brethren of the Third world have systematically moved from bad to worse. The fatal conspiracies of hunger and disease,  
and armed conflicts have taken away millions of African souls. Approximately 790 million people in the developing world are still chronically undernourished, of which the overwhelming majority reside in Africa,  
Asia and around the Pacific region.  
 
Malnutrition lowers the resistance to illness, and illness aggravates malnutrition, while hunger and disease chase each other down the spiral that leads to death or life-long handicap (Harrison, 1985). This has been the case of Niger, the Darfur region of Sudan, Zimbabwe, Zambia and other affected Sub-Saharan countries. According to UNICEF, 30,000 children die each day due to poverty. And they “die quietly in some of the poorest villages on earth, far removed from the 
scrutiny and the conscience of the world. Being meek and weak in life, make these dying multitudes are even more invisible in death.” 
 
The rampant armed conflicts in Africa do not 
only cost lives directly. They also kill indirectly because, once the planting of crops and proper sanitation are compromised, diseases, famine and death will ultimately follow. It is worth mentioning that military spending in the world was estimated in 1998 at 780 billion US dollars, while Pet foods in Europe and the United States was also put in the same year at 17 billion dollars. FROM THESE HARD FACTS, IT IS NOW CLEAR THAT THE DOGS AND CATS OF THE A WESTERN WORLD HAVE A HIGHER STANDARD OF LIVING THAN AVERAGE 
AFRICANS, AND THAT HUMANKIND IS MORE PREOCCUPIED WITH INSTRUMENTS OF WAR AND DEATH THAN THOSE THAT CAN SAVE THE LIVES OF THE POOR AND THE POWERLESS OF THE WORLD! 
 
Of all human rights failures today, those in 
the political, economic and social areas are by far the most widespread across the world’s nations, and they affect a very large multitude with devastating consequences. It is truth that every Coup d’Etats or armed conflict in Africa takes its rise from 
multinationals, Neo-colonialists, greedy African elites and neighbouring countries. The outcome of these sad events is always death, destruction and with the instigators carting away the riches of the afflicted countries overnight. This has been the case 
of the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire).  
This country theoretically is the richest country in the world in terms of natural resources, but the greed of certain western powers and some Congolese nationals has undermined the development efforts of the country for over half a century! The effects of these malicious plots have been endless civil wars, and with the shameless looting of the resources of this blessed land by some multinational corporations, sometimes with the complicity of their governments. 
 
These atrocities have no doubt plunged the 
Congolese people deeper into the crushing effects poverty and disease, in their own world of aplenty, as a direct consequence of man’s inhumanity to man. It is worth mentioning that it was the Uranium from the Congo, composed in the infamous atomic bombs that exploded in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War. Thus, the resources from the Congo helped the Americans tremendously in reaching their Superpower status. 
 
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 that led to the 
deaths of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, was mainly powered by the hatred and suspicion introduced into the country through the principle of “divide and rule” by the Belgian colonizers in 1926 for their own 
selfish reasons. Thus, it is ironical to see the Belgians engaging themselves in bringing the genocidaires to justice, without first checking their own backyard to reconcile with their atrocious contribution to Rwandan history! 
 
We are not saying that the Western world is 
solely responsible for all the woes of Africa. It is an open secret that Africa has a crisis leadership. Personal greed, bribery and corruption, tribalism, bureaucracy, regionalism and all the other vices 
associated with bad governance have plunged some African countries into something like “private estates” of the political elites. 
 
The African people have been over the years,  
suing for their rightful place under the sun in terms of better governance and fairer trade packages. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) or the Eight Fold Pathway for humankind, put in place by the world’s 
leaders in the year 2000, is a theoretical framework that has been designed to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and powerless of the world. Although some steps have been made towards the achievements of these goals, there have been unfortunate reports of feet dragging on the part of rich countries and donor agencies. 
 
The Gleneagles Debt Relief Deal for 18 
countries and with a possible extension to 38 
countries is most welcomed, but the cancellation of the entire debt burden of the poor countries in the world will not remove anything from the greatness of 
the rich and powerful States. Also, the poorer the country, the more likely it is that debt repayments are being extracted directly from people who neither 
contracted the loans nor received any of the money, and hence plunging them deeper into the pangs of poverty. Statistics show that the world’s 497 billionaires in 2001 registered a combined wealth of $1.54 trillion, well over the combined gross national products of all the nations of sub-Saharan Africa ($929.3 billion) or those of the oil-rich regions of the Middle East and North Africa ($1.34 trillion). 
Incidentally, this superfluous combined wealth of the billionaires is also greater than the combined incomes of the poorest half of humanity!  
 
This simply means that a few hundred people and their governments can effectively provide all the necessary finances, using just a fraction of their resources to Roll Back scourges of malaria, HIV/AIDS 
and pandemic poverty that have been killing millions of God’s children if they want to. But unfortunately, some of these people have lost the ability to love their neighbours of the world as preached by our Lord 
and Saviour Jesus Christ. There is even a school of thought propagating the idea that Jesus Christ will be crucified a thousand fold, if He has to come once again as human being, to reproach the wickedness of the world or try to redress man’s inhumanity to man!  
 
The UN Secretary General, Koffi Annan, in a 
speech on the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, 17 October 2000, said “Almost half the world’s populations live on less than two dollars a day, yet even this statistic fails to capture the humiliation, powerlessness and brutal hardship that is the daily lot of the world’s poor.” Hence, poverty takes away the dignity of the have not, hamstrings the normal mental and physical development of people, as a result of malnutrition, disease, famine and the more than frequent passing away of loved ones in the afflicted families and communities. This status-quo has been cited as the main cause of many armed conflicts and some terrorists’ acts around the world,  
especially in the cases where the dispossessed are struggling to dislodge exploitative systems. 
 
The causes of world poverty cannot be 
overemphasized. Unfair trade practices of the Western world, bad governance in the Third world, natural and factors have been cited. However, subsidies to producers in the rich countries were the main bone of contention in the Hong Kong ministerial meeting of the members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2005. And once again, a virtually empty package was given to the poorest and powerless of the human family.  
 
Subsidies have long been described as royalties to the rich to the detriment of the poor. Some diehard African activists have also described this unfair practice, as giving compensations to descendants of former slave owners and their businesses for the loss of free slave labour in their 
plantations, while others see the unfair current disposition of globalization as an extension of the supposedly abolished Slave Trade of the yesteryears!! We can sum this up using the words of Dom Helda Camara, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” 
 
The Panafrican Democratic Movement for the Renaissance (PDMR); an African Youth movement think-tank based in Tripoli, Libya is an instrument that strives for an Africa and world where everybody has a fair place under the sun. We therefore 
urged African leaders to show deep commitment to good governance, without which the war against poverty, HIV/AIDS, malaria and other perils of underdevelopment cannot be won. We must all realize that corruption is the fundamental obstacle to African Development, which widens societal inequalities, breach the trust between people and their governments, and subsequently pushes 
disgruntled citizens to rebellion when all hope is lost. 
 
In this light, we are also urging African 
Leaders to declare their assets on assumption and departure from top public offices. Leaders should remember that they are SERVANTS and NOT FEUDAL LORDS to their people, and should discharge all their duties with transparency and patriotism. FOR A NATION OF PATRIOTS IS A POTENTIAL SUPERPOWER! We, Africans have the potentials to lip-frogged into the digital era and not be left behind and be a loughing stock and a continent of paradoxes and subject of degraded television images in international media. May God hear our prayers for the 2006. 
 
Long live PDMR 
Long Live African Union 
 
Silang Emmanuel Sanda 
------------------------------------------------- 
 
AMERICA ORGANIZING BULLETS AGAINST SYRIA REGIME. 
/27 October 2005. 
 
The Western and American machination against the Arab regimes is another time on the way. It had been thought that with the damages recorded by the American forces in Iraq and the chaos of NATO in Afghanistan that could be an essential leitmotiv for a self-criticism and a questioning of the international politics of the so-called greater world power and its always allies. Since a few weeks and with the announcement recently made (Wednesday October 26) by the German magistrate Detlev Mehlis scorning the sovereignty of the Syrian people and taxing another time the leaders of this country, to be unconditional persons responsible for the assassination of the former prime minister Rafic Hariri and which the son of this last intervenes rather imprudently by stressing that the criminals must be stopped and pursued. It is to say that the Iraqi example would still not have helped the Arab brothers to be looked in the mirror to measure the fatal weight of the somatic sufferings which they cause to their people. 
 
What interests us strangely is the importance attached to the death of this ex-minister by the Western and American states. If he had still been in businesses, one should have understood this aspect of eagerness against the Syrian regime. One person does not have to be a political tactician to realize that behind this search or this conquest of the truth on the death of Hariri there are convincing alibis; i.e. the fact that Syria is in the red list of the Americans in the famous "Axis of evil" of Bush son and that Syria is bordered to Iraq, the American forces do not succeed in controlling its borders that they regard them as a door to enter for the combatants of freedom also against the occupation of Iraq (- especially in comparison with the vertiginous fall of the coast of popularity of President Bush); A strategy would have to be found politically being able to enter to Syria and it is precisely why in the intervention of the American President of yesterday on the CNN TV, he projected already the use of the force to lead Syria to cooperate in this famous UNO investigation. What already gave the occasion to Condelezza Rice and the French ambassador in the United Nations to seal bonds of friendship, a quite dotted formula to sponge down the dissension which still transpierces Franco-American alliances about the invasion of Iraq and thus France would like to be caught up with. Then, the control of Syria supposes an end of the war in Iraq and a weakening of Iran; what would precisely make it possible American to have the exclusive monopoly on the Arab world and to impose in one part its policy of "Big Belly" on the petroleum of the Middle East and remotely thwarting the progression of China which is becoming more and more a great danger against American hegemony in the rest of the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Lastly, what differentiates the death of the former Syrian prime minister to the death of the first Sudanese vice-president Dr. John Garang? This last which came at a few days close reaching the supreme office of the country as a second political personality of a country torn and divided into two by a war of more than twenty years; This death which almost did not interest the world nor even the United Nations still did not have a final verdict and one would wonder until when UNO publishes its conclusions on the crash of the helicopter and a probable pursue of the authors of this assassination or for better saying this putsch. An interrogation is that, if the Americans and the westerners absolutely want to find out the authors of Rafic death, this Syrian former prime minister, is it not because perhaps he was having a great game to play in the region beside the same Americans against the Arab interests or otherwise against the Syrian interests? Wasn’t he a spy at the service of the CIA? Why such ostentation? Isn’t a truthful two weights two measurements? Or then Africa in general and Sudan in particular are interested only when it is a matter of wars or starvation or the famous plans the fight against the HIV pandemic? Or even then, is it simply a question of an American hallucination against the Arab, well skilful regimes to be self-managed and car-to be enough without always needing in each time, to resort to the helps of the "great democracies" to manage their people? It would be known one day... and that the world accompanies us in its events. 
 
Gilbert. 
 

 

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