z czterech stron swiata

palmela

Makoko

Badia West

palmela

NIGERIA: Child rape in Kano on the increase
Posted by roboblogger Jan 4, 2008 |
“You need to warn her not to get close to a strange face and to run home if she is beckoned”
KANO, 3 January 2008 - Police and government officials in northern Nigeria's city of Kano have reported an upsurge in incidents of child rape and said that young girls are now unsafe in the city. via IRIN

[link widoczny dla zalogowanych]

palmela

palmela

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Tree felling
"Shelter belts” of young saplings planted by the government to protect against desertification are being chopped down for firewood before the trees can grow.
This man is cutting down a tree on the border of his compound. He says it won’t fall on his house, but he needs to cut it down so he can sell the wood.
Removing trees like this weakens the soil and more blows away every year.
Deforestation is the reason the Sahara desert is spreading south, gradually consuming villages like this.

(pas ochronny z sadzonek jest przeciwko odlesieniu.
ktore nie pozwalaja Saharze posuwac sie na poludnie )

palmela

Nigeria: When the Petrodollar Cannot Save Locals From Food Insecurity
8 October 2008
Posted to the web 8 October 2008
Okello Oculi

The British coloniser robbed villages of the men who would have produced food while, buoyed by petrodollars, the generals silenced everybody - including farmers - into inactivity as the sector stagnated.

It has become a cliché to blame oil wealth for the food insecurity in Nigeria. This widely-held view ignores the destruction of the agricultural sector by the colonial and post-1966 military dictatorships.

To appreciate the destruction brought about by British military dictatorship, politicians and officials of the Ministry of Agriculture should read doctoral theses and other researches by historians at the Ahmadu Bello University in the 1970s and 1980s.

For instance, Mahmoud Tukur's doctoral work contains reports by provincial commissioners in which British settlers and District Officers celebrated deaths from famine of hundreds of thousands of villagers and traditional Hausa urban communities.

The famine had been predicted by them after they had herded thousands of able-bodied males to build government offices, construct railway lines and roads; and dig soils on the Jos Plateau to extract tin and other minerals.
No provision had been made to feed families whose crop productions had drastically fallen because the women, old men and children left behind could not compensate for the labour stolen from their traditional agricultural sector.

Orphaned farmers
The new regime of famine only deepened as British colonial dictatorship grew in length and economic greed. No wonder, Nigeria's independence in 1960 was welcomed by profound food insecurity.

The post-1966 military regimes denied political power to the voices and hunger of the over 80 per cent of the population that lived by agriculture and agricultural trade in the rural areas. Military dictators banned elected parliaments, state assemblies and local councils.

The groups of politicians that rural farmers could have put pressure on to improve agriculture were silenced. The orphaned millions of rural farmers and urban food marketers and processors had no voices to demand that huge amounts of wealth earned from oil exports be invested in agricultural development.

Instead, hundreds of millions of naira was spent to import beef and frozen chicken from Brazil and elsewhere; canned juices and beer from Holland, Israel and elsewhere thereby denying investment in new levels and forms of production by rural communities.

The silencing of rural communities also had the terrible effect of stopping them from making demands on the education sector. Village communities could not demand that the content of primary school education should reflect the needs of their economic activities. Likewise, with the subjects taught in secondary schools.

Village communities could not put pressure on technical schools and colleges to create tools for sinking boreholes and building small dams and methods of preserving mangoes and fruit juices over long periods. In fact, the vast local food sector, including cassava, yam and vegetable sub sectors were insulted as non cash crops.

That exciting legend in American economic history of black Americans inventing technologies for storing pounded fried groundnuts (into peanut butter) making and preserving marmalades and jam, etc, remained unknown and shut out from these military epochs in Nigeria's economic history.

The contrast is more dramatic at university levels: Whereas American farmers and local tax payers demanded that their local and federal governments should create and support 106 "land grant" universities to serve their needs for scientific and industrial knowledge and tools for economic progress, the American scenario had very limited echoes among the vast majority of Nigeria's economic producers.

The experiences of thousands of Nigerians who studied in America's land-grant universities (like Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, the University networks of Wisconsin and California) failed to resonate back into Nigeria's policy towards agriculture and agribusiness precisely because the political pressure group that would have forced politicians to do so vegetated in silence under military boots.

This political disease was not limited to Nigeria. It is remarkable that it is only at its January 2007 summit that African presidents (meeting as the African Union), announced that they would encourage "more African youth to take up studies in science, technology and engineering, and invite Member States to pay special attention to the teaching of science and technology".

To achieve this they stated that they would ensure "the enhanced role and the revitalisation of African universities and other African institutions of higher education as well as scientific and technology and engineering education and development..."

This new wisdom came after over 40 years of independence for most African countries. Military dictators all across Africa had failed to see that the military might of the United States and the European Union countries had vital roots in agricultural and agriculture-related industrialisation. Not needing votes from rural communities, military dictators worried more about guns and death from bullets as key tools of their power.

Yet the post-1966 military rulers are not the only ones to blame. Nigeria's private sector also remained blind to the linkage that the Japanese, Koreans, Americans and Europeans had always made between universities and economic productivity. Those of them who were merely retail and wholesale traders were comfortable with dealing with goods whose production techniques they cared little about and were not interested in supporting research that would have resulted in their being produced locally.

They were comfortable with having their stomachs and throats colonised by whiskies, brandies, beers, imported beef and confectioneries that were products of external universities and technical institutes.

Bankers remain contemptuously indifferent to calls for loans to kick-start the growth of cottage technologies to fuel small and medium scale enterprises. The rich field of scientific innovation (from work in biotechnology, raw materials-related technology, and from agricultural products, etc), remains too imagination-intensive to compete with more exciting money-spinners like recycling foreign currencies or funding oil bunkering, or holding in their vaults salaries for staff of ministries, parastatals and universities and funds for capital projects.

Bankers have also failed to intervene in the vital field of effective transport for moving agricultural products. In their book: Nigeria's Economic Crisis: Causes and Solution, a team of academics at the Ahmadu Bello University, showed that British companies that once controlled the importation of motor vehicles for the Nigerian market, conspired with local officials in charge of railway administration to cripple the country's railway transport system.

In the 1970s, these British companies found new local allies in owners of oil tankers as and road building contractors. Oil tankers destroy roads thereby sustaining demands for contracts for road repairs.

The reliance on roads and non-existent roads causes severe problems for farmers. Cattle alone are tortured and starved in trips from markets in Maiduguri, Yola, Sokoto, Kano (in the far north) to consumer sites like Port Harcourt, Enugu, Lagos, Ibadan (in the far south). Tomatoes and mangoes rot under un-refrigerated conditions as they are trucked to the markets.

Strange banking logic
Despite their awareness of this destructive economic regime, Nigeria's bankers have failed to lobby for and put pressure on the media and civil society groups to campaign for pro-rail transport policies.

A strange banking logic has grown as more branches are opened to serve increasingly impoverished and stagnant rural agricultural and semi-industrial sectors.

Finally, the banking sector has continued to ignore the fact that of the highly developed economies of the world, only Switzerland has a record of less than 50 per cent of its population being university graduates.

Moreover, industrial success stories like Japan, South Korea and Singapore have combined compulsory universal primary education with heavy investment in large numbers of students and professionals in high technological colleges, academies of engineering, and institutes engaged in the promotion technological innovation.

By a bizarre conspiracy, bankers have remained silent as high visibility has continued to be given by the media and elite culture to student enrolments into Law degree courses and the practice of Law that have no planned linkage with increased productivity in agriculture and industry. In this blame game, Nigeria's diplomats may not be innocent.

It is clear for example, that Gambia imports rice from Thailand in massive quantities. The imports enter markets as far away as Mali and Nigeria.

In this game, the immediate losers are rice producers in the inland delta on the River Niger inside Mali; rice producers in the Niger, Kano and Ebonyi states in Nigeria.

Gambia is, therefore used as pathway of economic sabotage. It is not clear that Nigeria's diplomats (who habitually work behind the backs of peasant farmers who lack this information and its implications for their prosperity), have evolved a policy for dealing with this challenge of economic diplomacy.

They have certainly not mobilised students of colleges of agriculture to mount demonstrations against Gambia's economic diplomacy and its implications for the prosperity of citizens of Ecowas. Neither have they urged these students to demand that Japan's monopoly of the car market in Nigeria be compensated by capital to support technological innovation in processing shea-butter nuts into products ranging from cosmetics to medicines.

The way forward is to view Nigeria's food security within a framework that is historically and sector-wise wider than ensuring adequate supplies of cereals.

The vital issue of democratic politics; of developing the power of voices of the rural communities in influencing economic policies and economic diplomacy; of industrially innovative and relevant education; and the role of the intellectual leadership of the private sector, must all be brought into debates and policies relevant to the agricultural sector.

palmela

Nigeryjskie ajnsztajny w maju wyslaly stelite w przestrzen kosmiczna.
Rolling Eyes

Chyba kupili ja od Chinczykow.

Zaczela wirowac niekontrolowanie i musieli ja unieszkodliwic.

Typowe! Za co sie czarnuchy nie wezma to porazka.

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palmela

The governor blamed arsonists trying to damage his reputation
A fully-equipped hospital that lay unused for two years has burned to the ground in northern Nigeria.
The General Hospital in Maiduguri was built in 2006 but the state government refused to open it until the president came to cut the ribbon.

Several surgical theatres, the intensive care ward, and the clinical section which held millions of dollars of equipment were all destroyed.

The president was due to visit the hospital next month to open it.

Borno State Governor Ali Modu Sheriff blamed the fire on arsonists who wanted to damage his political reputation.

The governor had refused to open the hospital, which was ready for patients in June 2006, until former President Olusegun Obasanjo came to the state.

There is not one hospital owned by a state government that has the type of world class equipment we had in there

Ali Modu Sheriff,
Governor of Borno state

His visit was postponed several times, the last being just two months before the election in 2007.

His successor Umaru Yar'adua was due to visit later next month.

Borno was recently hit by a measles outbreak that killed hundreds of children across three states.

Existing hospitals in Borno are poorly equipped and overcrowded.

Angry residents of Bulunkutu, where the hospital was situated, gathered around the burned hospital and shouted abuse at the alleged arsonists, local papers reported.

The governor addressed the arsonists through the media.

"There is not one hospital in the country owned by a state government that has the type of world class equipment we had in there. It is their people that would have benefitted," he told reporters at the scene.

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