By: Risto Karajkov, European Voice, Brussels, Belgium, May 8, 2008

What follows is a true story.

A European Union consultancy wins a contract in the western Balkans. It is stipulated that a specialized engineer with at least 15 years’ experience must be one of the key senior experts for the entire duration of the project, of around 80 days.

The consultancy receives for this expert’s services around 800 euros ($1,235) per day, lump. “Lump” means all expenses (accommodation, food, etc.) are included. It is administratively convenient, but also widely (ab)used to maximize profits—flying low-cost and budgeting full-fare and so on.

Since the consultancy cannot itself identify this key expert, such people being in short supply, it subcontracts another consultancy, from the same European Union country, to provide the person—for 300 euros ($463) a day.

But the second contractor is also unable to find the required expert, and hires a consultancy from a Balkan capital to hire the person—this time for 100 euros ($154) a day. The local firm does so, and the project is successfully implemented.

Here’s a bonus question: How much was the engineer actually paid?

In actuality, that matters only to him or her. The entire amount will be put down as European Union aid to the Balkan country in question, however little it sees of it.

There is nothing illicit or corrupt here. Everything has gone perfectly by the book and any bitter taste such everyday practices leave behind are rarely discussed; it is not smart to bite the hand that feeds you.

A couple of months ago the European Court of Auditors presented its evaluation of CARDS (Community Assistance for Reconstruction, Development, and Stabilization), the European Union’s aid package for the Balkans, worth more than 5 billion euros ($7.7 billion) in 2000-06.

The report echoed the “good in parts” language of the 2004 midterm evaluation of CARDS conducted by a consortium of consultancies. There was the routine criticism of bureaucracy, delays, over-centralization, lack of strategic guidance, all no doubt fair.

But the court also showed a degree of acerbity, pinpointing examples of money being spent in ways that had little or nothing to do with the supposed objectives. In 2003, for example, 2.8 million euros ($4.3 million) was allocated to strengthening border protection in Macedonia. It was supposed to pay for training of officials, improving recruitment, and buying sophisticated equipment for checking documents. All of it, in fact, was spent on buying vehicles.

Yet the report is silent about the elephants in the room, the overpriced Western consultancies that can eat up a few million euros quite quickly.

The system’s defenders say that only a small proportion of foreign assistance is spent in this way. But anyone involved knows there are good reasons why there has not been the—plainly overdue—thorough chicken count. They know too why there is resistance to making the whole aid business fairer and more transparent.

Hotshot international experts cost a lot. But should they be permitted to charge more in Sarajevo than they can reasonably charge in London?

And should a Harvard-educated local get so much less than an expatriate, including one who is not Harvard-educated?

The rules tend to reflect income disparities between the Balkans and the West. But the disparity between Skopje and Brussels is not 12-15 times, which can easily be the difference between local and expatriate consultant fees.

And while we are on the subject of hotshot consultants, is there really a need for quite so many of them at all? Such work, like any other type of aid delivery, should be driven by demand not supply. Some donor countries have acted on this in recent times and reduced drastically the amounts of aid spent in this way.

That consultants enrich themselves from the generosity of donor nations undermines the whole point of foreign aid. It spreads cynicism among those in the field providing aid and among donor nations.

Perhaps worst of all is the corrosive effect on citizens of the failed states that are the subject of so much generosity.

From European Voice.

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By Ali Mazrui

Prof. Ali Mazrui
In January 1808, the US Congress abolished the slave trade. The British had abolished it the previous year. What neither legislature has done 200 years later is pass legislation to compensate Blacks for hundreds of years of enslavement and degradation.

Earlier this week, the US Supreme Court ruled that apartheid victims could sue multinational corporations that facilitated violation of their human rights.

Is this a new chapter in Black emancipation process?

While the abolitionist movement in the 18th and 19th centuries was mainly inspired by benevolent changes in the Western world, the new reparationist movement in the 20th and 21st centuries has been inspired by malevolent continuities in the Black world.

The benevolent changes that favoured the abolitionist movement were partly technological and partly socio-normative. Innovations like the cotton gin made slave labour superfluous to capitalism. The abolitionist movement found a more responsive political establishment as slave-labour became technologically more anachronistic.

Additionally, Western values were getting more liberalised in other areas such as the extension of the franchise to the working classes in the 19th Century, and the beginnings of agitations for women’s rights. More efficient technology and more liberal ideology converged to boost the abolitionist movement in Europe and the Americas.

These were the benevolent changes in the West whose cumulative impact favoured the abolition of slave trade and subsequently slavery itself. Even the political emancipation of Roman Catholics in Britain was a cause that William Wilberforce championed a decade prior to conversion to the more drastic cause of seeking abolition of slave trade and slavery.

But the consequences of enslavement and colonisation are not merely research topics for scholars. They are also the genesis of horrendous civil wars and normative collapse in contemporary places like Liberia, Angola, and even Somalia. Such are the malevolent continuities of colonialism.

The consequences of enslavement and colonisation are not merely themes for plenary sessions at African Studies conventions; they are subjects of malfunctioning post-colonial economies in Africa, and the distorted socio-economic relations in the African Diaspora. These are the malevolent continuities of both colonialism and racism.

The inspiration behind the on-going reparations movement was not from change but continuity. It was from the persistent deprivation and anguish in the Black world arising out of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. The consequences of enslavement and colonisation are not chapters in history books; they are pangs of pain in the poorer parts of Harlem, Washington, DC, and the anti-Black police batons in the streets of Detroit, Rio de Janeiro, London, and Paris. These are some of the malevolent continuities of racism.

The consequences of enslavement and colonisation are not dusty documents in historical archives, but the figures of Black infant mortality in Haiti, Washington DC, and Uganda. Here once more are the malevolent continuities of racism.

While the most historically visible heroes of the abolitionist movement were disproportionately White, the emerging visible heroes of the reparationist movement are overwhelmingly Black.

White historically visible abolitionists in Great Britain included William Wilberforce (1759-1833). The historically visible abolitionists in the US included the martyred John Brown (1800-1859) and, in a special sense of abolitionism, martyred Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). William Lloyd Garrison (1833-1870) founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was for a while among the best known American abolitionists.

This is quite apart from Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851), arguably the most important female abolitionist influence in the early history of the movement in the United States, alongside Lydia Maria Child.

There were of course also Black abolitionists including such towering and brilliant activists as Frederick Douglass (1817-1895). But by the very nature of the power-structure of the period, Black abolitionists had less influence on their own than did either slave rebellions, on one side, or white abolitionists, on the other.

Wing of Black global opinion

Black slave rebellions sought to challenge the power of the slave system; white abolitionists sought to challenge the legitimacy of the slave system. Black abolitionists attempted to be allies of both, but they were weaker than either. Yet, even in their lonely isolation, Black abolitionists displayed remarkable courage and heroism.

While the older abolitionist movement was disproportionately led by liberal members of the Western Establishment, contemporary reparationist movement has been disproportionately advanced and steered by the nationalist wing of Black global opinion.

While 2004 marked the 200th anniversary of the Haitian revolution, 2004 also marked the 100th anniversary of the Maji Maji war against the Germans in Tanganyika. The Maji Maji war was inspired by an East African version of voodoo.

The warrior’s immersion into water was supposed to provide a magical shield against German bullets. Those beliefs were successful in mobilising the masses with next to no training or organization. In reality the African warriors’ baptism was no match for German bullets.

The Maji Maji war lasted from 1904 to 1906, a much shorter period than the Haitian wars. The Maji Maji war was brutally suppressed by the Germans. In the short run, the Haitian revolution had a happier outcome.

In addition to marking both 200th anniversary of the Haitian revolution and the 100th anniversary of the Maji Maji war, the year 2004 also marked approximately the 50th anniversary of the Mau Mau war against the British in Kenya.

The Mau Mau, like Maji Maji, also invoked a version of East African voodoo. But Mau Mau, unlike Maji Maji, did not emphasise the protective qualities of baptism by water. It invoked ritual use of menstrual blood and worked out elaborate oaths of allegiance for warriors stripped naked for the ceremonies. The warriors fought bravely in spite of the military odds.

Unlike Maji Maji, the Mau Mau did defeat the British politically though not militarily. The Mau Mau warriors fought from 1952 to about 1960. They convinced the British that it was time to pull out of Kenya as an imperial power. The British colonial exit occurred in 1963.

Some Blacks reformers believe that those companies that benefited from Apartheid should pay a price for it. They are on course.

About The Author(s): Prof. Ali Mazrui is Chancellor of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture, Kenya. | More Articles By Ali Mazrui |

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When the rich meet: Jay Z and Prince Charles in London

Going forward in life is not just the amount of money in our pockets.

No doubt, opportunities to earn make a big difference.

But what may be more important is the Human Right to have a healthy childhood in which to create, be shaped and molded, to find one’s potential.

Outside of the West, but inside too, the future of youth is not seriously being considered.

I’ve conversed with and actively been able to listen, learn and lend some life experiences to those under 25 years old. The startling brilliance of these youth is a constant inspiration. But they are calling out for help: the older ones of this world population are not in step with them. Admission of the coming crisis in the numbers-Iran to the US Virgin Islands, youngsters are often a third to three quarters of the total residents. In five dozen African nations, orphans from 1990s wars, (cornucopia of guns from France, China, USA and UK) malaria and HIV AIDS are coming of age.

Born in Ghana, Canada, or Germany or Palestine, youth have been telling me that they cannot trust most adults, even their parents. Rage simmers and explodes in violence via the gun or firm adherence to the fundamentalism of an ideology. Some turn to narcotizing themselves with purchasing mobile phones that cost a week’s wages-whether they have a job or not. Sweden has a least 20 billion kronor in welfare payments wrongly paid out each year. Degrading low wage work for corporations and governments await even the most serious of school graduates in almost any country globally. If the generations previously took what they could and got away with it, why shouldn’t they?

Others don’t bathe, or even eat, find their salvation in drugs ignited by a flame, snorted or drunk from a bottle. Infants born to the parents in the glow of consumption of burned dreams fall into a further crevice of pain and numb loss.

In Oslo, Norway or Honiaga, Solomon Islands, the strain to get some human respect for themselves or from the society is deathly. In one nation, oil wealth and beautiful natural expanses cannot keep a massive Nordic heroin addiction at bay.

In a Pacific island world of tropic splendor, the highest suicide rates in the world combine with forced assimilation to produce more drug related casualties.

In Liberia, Congo and though disputed, the USA, child soldiers have put their bloodstained tatoos on the recent past. Murdering for governments or street organizations, the social despair and drugs markets have been expanded.

In Colombia, Mexico and the drug superstore the USA, gunshot wounds and the prison door have become status symbols.

In America’s sprawling system of incarceration, as in places such as Yemen, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, youth are caged with adults in prisons.

Some will argue the mantra of “work hard, study hard…” keeps a new age group achieving success.

If the youth can be seen as a “demographic” what do they gain?

Is pain a product for sale?

And, if there is a hole in the soul, what is the cure?

A revolution, the reach for life instead of an existence has to be made.

18 November 2007
From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002

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