first published 9-November-2004
DECONSTRUCTING THE SOVEREIGN PLANTATION (sorry, PROTECTORATE)
Better Life Shadow: Hey, Old Good Fellow ! How's life on your plantation nowadays.
OGF: Fine, fine. We are surviving. Which one be plantation? This na independent place o.
BLS: The plantation you live and work in. Do you not produce vegetable oil, mineral oil and cheap labour for the markets? What else do you make?
OGF: Never thought of it as a plantation before.
BLS; Do you not work all day and all night, for years on end, with very little to show for it?
OGF: Not me! I am the head of the household staff. I crack the whip on the field hands and make sure our production levels are always up.
BLS: Ah, you are the super on this plantation?
OGF: Yes ke. I am the oga patapata. Apart from god above and our investors just beneath him.
BLS: What does god do for you? What do your investors do for you?
OGF: How dare you blaspheme the name of the almighty? Can you not see this plantation is very productive?!
BLS: I see a lot of people toiling relentlessly in the fields. A lot are dying of hunger. But a lot of food is rotting.
OGF: That one is not the fault of god or the investors. The ones dying are too lazy to work. The food is for export to our investor, One Across The Water.
BLS: Chineke! Is OATW your god? What has she invested? Why waste food when people are dying?
OGF: Mind yoursef before I discipline you. OATW brought me god, the almighty who shall never die.
BLS: What capital or labour or anything tangible has OATW invested in this plantation, then?
OGF: Questions, questions. I told you already: god was her only investment here. The people you see provide all the investment we need.
BLS: (in disbelief) These people provide all the investment and they are dying of want?! Can they not use what they have to improve their own lives?
OGF: And make me look bad when next I go into the house to meet OATW? God go punish you.
BLS: (angry) Akotileta!! Who made you oga here? YOU should be careful the people do not mutiny and burn the house down and you with it.
Old good fellow thinks about this. This better life seems to make sense.
OGF: What should I do? The plantation owes OATW a lot of money. If we no pay, OATW will not buy our food and the people will starve even more.
BLS: And so what? The people are already starving. Sell them the food. Anyway, how come the plantation owes OATW a lot of money?
OGF: Even me sef, I no know. All the other plantations around here are in the same position. When OATW arrived here with god, my father's neighbours built the house for them with our own sweat and blood. OATW was very generous to our neighbours, sha.
BLS: Generous to your neighbours? How?
OGF: OATW added our land to that of the neighbours and put them in charge. She told everybody: "I will train your people in how to better manage your land, if you agree to make it a plantation for me. I will buy your everything you make, provided you agree to take my god as your own."
My father did not think this was a good arrangement, and told OATW so. She became very angry and told her soldiers to rape, maim, loot and imprison my father's chiefs in the name of her god. Many died. Many were taken across the waters, never to be seen again (sobs).
When the fighting finished, OATW said we owed her the cost of killing our people and taking our land for her plantation. She told my neighbours to appoint a good house-super and make sure the debt is paid in full.
BLS: Laakuli, otherwise what will happen?
OGF: Otherwise, she will ask the dogs of war to come back.
BLS: So you must forever keep the plantation going in order to pay this bastard debt? Why not train your own dogs of war?
Old good fellow thinks about this. This better life sure asks a lot of sensible questions.
OGF: What should I do? The plantation is very beneficial for our neighbours and very profitable to OATW. They will not allow us to train our own dogs.
BLS: Haba! Without your own dogs, you cannot burn the house or protect the people. You will be attacked by your enemies and forced forever to pay the debts that make the people poor.
OGF: No worries. I have signed agreement with OATW to not attack me. I have agreed with my neighbours to give them bits and pieces of the plantation to add to their own plantations.
We produce a lot of food and oil that OATW wants to buy. As long as the plantation delivers, no wahala.
BLS: What will happen when the soil becomes tired and the well becomes dry and the debt is not yet paid?
OGF: (Happy at his own foresight) That is not my problem anymore!
BLS: Why not? Are you not the house-super, who is responsible for the well-being of the plantation workers?
OGF: The soil is being given free to OATW's people to grow their own food. The well is already owned by OATW. Besides, we need not worry about the people by that time!
BLS: Why not? Are the plantation people not agitating against this massive theft?
OGF: NO, OATW allows those potential trouble-makers who think they have sense to go to OATW's country, where they to work as feudal wage slaves. The trouble-makers who no want go are dealt with. Most of the rest are delibrately undereducated, malnourished and allowed to die of curable diseases.
BLS: You said most of the rest. What happens to the rest of the rest, then?
OGF: They rely on my generous handouts or they believe in OATW's god. Either way, they help to keep the plantation running. We got debts to pay!!
BLS: (mutters curses)
Showing posts with label new world order. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new world order. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Laisi Ariwo Rara, Akotileta Ti Ta Ile Run
The next firesale goes on, quietly
Very quietly; very, very quietly; two events happened in past fortnight (to 07 December 2004) that have significant implications for the future of Nigeria as a global power.
# NEPA was de-structured into six operating companies.
# BPE was restructured into five operations departments.
Both events were coordinated by USA Department of State, UK trade and development civil servants, IMF and World Bank officials who have been working within the Abuja, FCT offices of both NEPA and BPE for years.
NEPA is every Nigerians favorite whipping boy. The perennial complaint is there is never any consistent power supply. It has been analysed that the entire grid structure of the country will have to be replaced because the existing grid is of the wrong design. This writer thinks there should be numerous regionally decentralised grids rather than the present design of one nationally centralised super-grid. Doubtless some investors will obtain the contracts to manage the generating, distribution and service companies that will emerge from NEPA. It is less doubtful that any Nigerian companies will be appointed to these critical roles: they do not have international experience. Even if the current crop of seasoned engineers and senior management form a company, they will probably be overlooked.
It will be difficult for any country to develop large scale production capacity without reliable and AFFORDABLE electric power. Nigerians will hope that they do not share the experience of California, Venezuela, Britain, Canada, and ALL other economies that have privatised electricity. Their people now receive monthly shocks from their power bills.
The reorganisations at the Bureau of Privatisation of Enterprises is of utmost importance. The BPE holds the keys to Nigeria's future as a successful or failed country.
The BPE comes under the authority of Atiku Abubakar, the country's vice president and rumouredly, one of its richest businessmen. Nobody has ever released a corporate financial statement or private tax returns listing the great man's income, assets or directorships. There are no public financial records either for his boss, the president and millionaire farmer, Olusegun Obasanjo. Or for any of Nigeria's current or previous oligarchaic politicians and military rulers. But that is not the main issue here.
The main issue is that powers-that-be are bent on ensuring that Nigeria pushes through with transferring into assets that the Nigerian public collectively paid for over the years into control or ownership by the private sector. The batch of institutions lined up for the next firesale include NEPA, NNPC, NAA and the airports, Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria Stock Exchange, federal institutions of higher education, research institutes, and other core assets. Previously "failed" transfers like NITEL, Ajaokuta Steel works, NiPost and Nigeria Ports Authority will also be re-submitted. These were previously sold to "suit, suitcase, and suite" companies like Pentascope and Solgas. Those companies may well have their contracts renewed, as the akotileta government struggles to sell unfavoured assets into depressed world markets.
Nigeria may do well to ask why they consider themselves so smart when consecutive governments are getting away with sovereign murder.
Everything that is not rooted to the ground is being sold off. Even forestry rights are being sold off and farmland given away while government officials import basic foodstuff from all over the world. AT THIS RATE, NIGERIANS WILL SOON BECOME THE WORLD'S FIRST TOTALLY PREPAY ECONOMY. They will have to pay for their services twice, thrice, multiple times over, before they have any chance of using such services. Sometimes they will not get the services they paid such extortionate rates for. They will have nobody to complain to and no redress if they bother. Sounds like the GSM industry? Wait and see. The people in this country face the chilling prospect that, in a few year time, they will be taxed or charged to pay for national debts that are not secured by any national assets or national revenues.
If unchecked, the mugging going on may result in the entire country in slavery-plantation conditions. Current international market conditions are not appropriate for any country to be undertaking privatisations. Nigeria's assets are internationally denominated in USA dollars. That currency is in free fall in world markets. Yet its value is rising against the Naira in local markets. Why? Nigeria has to import everything and its trade is denominated in USD. So importers must buy USD no matter what.
Businesses are no better run or less corrupt just because they are operated by the private sector. Witness the meltdown of Enron (USA), Arthur Anderson (UK/USA), savings and loans industry (USA), railway privatisation (UK), pension funds (UK), Fannie Mae (USA), Common Agricultural Policy (EU) and other multi-billion private-sector frauds.
Even the average person knows that a time of penury is not the best time to seek a bank loan or negotiate a decent deal from a pawnbroker. The privatisation madness and economic liberalisation crassness should stop, if only to give Nigerians a chance to run their own affairs. The current management of many public companies slated for privatisation will do a decent job if the government gives them a management contract and then pays its way like any other consumer. History indicates that privatised ownership or control of Nigerian people's assets results in disdain and abuse of the people's interests. Already the beneficiaries of Nigerian Airways giveaway are saying that no Nigerian should expect a high level appointment in the Virgin Airways (UK).
Presumably, the president and senior government officials of Nigeria will shamelessly sit in first class while their people in coach class are "flitted" with deodorants and pesticides like dirty coachroaches on flights leaving the country.
The advocates of these mugging activities are dangerous to our national wealth. They would be roundly denounced in any sensible society and they would be forced to leave positons of such responsibility. But the intellectuals of this country are slavering over scraps just so they can feel priviledged.
Paradoxically, the privations may be the making ot the Nigerian people. The continued spate of privatisations will almost certainly remove the last vestiges of common interests from the populace. At last, the colonial-era construct may render and free its progressive elements to pursue alternative political arrangements. This need not be a BAD thing. Witness Somalia, so lawless since 1991 to date. It has the most connected telecommunications and air transport market in Africa, entirely because the lawlessness prevented akotileta governments from attaining national power. Somalia has the cheapest national and international calling rates in Africa. It takes three days to connect a landline telephone. Every warlord had to look after his people. So he allowed enterprises to thrive in this fiefdom and taxed them. The national airports destroyed? Warlords built private airstrips and jetties using Somalian engineers. Now that the country has a "president", nobody dares use foreign engineers to build roads, bridges, buildings, and other basic civil infrastructure. How unlike our Julius Berger capital!
Somalia has learnt the lessons of national strategic interests the hard way. If Somalia had oil, their engineers will dominate the oil sector. If they fix their airline, would you bet against Somalian pilots, crew and check-in staff? You CAN bet that no jumped-up foreigner will dare "flit" a flight to or from Somalia!
Links:
http://p221.ezboard.com/fnigeriadiscussionsfrm2.showMessage?topicID=791.topic
___________________
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
Very quietly; very, very quietly; two events happened in past fortnight (to 07 December 2004) that have significant implications for the future of Nigeria as a global power.
# NEPA was de-structured into six operating companies.
# BPE was restructured into five operations departments.
Both events were coordinated by USA Department of State, UK trade and development civil servants, IMF and World Bank officials who have been working within the Abuja, FCT offices of both NEPA and BPE for years.
NEPA is every Nigerians favorite whipping boy. The perennial complaint is there is never any consistent power supply. It has been analysed that the entire grid structure of the country will have to be replaced because the existing grid is of the wrong design. This writer thinks there should be numerous regionally decentralised grids rather than the present design of one nationally centralised super-grid. Doubtless some investors will obtain the contracts to manage the generating, distribution and service companies that will emerge from NEPA. It is less doubtful that any Nigerian companies will be appointed to these critical roles: they do not have international experience. Even if the current crop of seasoned engineers and senior management form a company, they will probably be overlooked.
It will be difficult for any country to develop large scale production capacity without reliable and AFFORDABLE electric power. Nigerians will hope that they do not share the experience of California, Venezuela, Britain, Canada, and ALL other economies that have privatised electricity. Their people now receive monthly shocks from their power bills.
The reorganisations at the Bureau of Privatisation of Enterprises is of utmost importance. The BPE holds the keys to Nigeria's future as a successful or failed country.
The BPE comes under the authority of Atiku Abubakar, the country's vice president and rumouredly, one of its richest businessmen. Nobody has ever released a corporate financial statement or private tax returns listing the great man's income, assets or directorships. There are no public financial records either for his boss, the president and millionaire farmer, Olusegun Obasanjo. Or for any of Nigeria's current or previous oligarchaic politicians and military rulers. But that is not the main issue here.
The main issue is that powers-that-be are bent on ensuring that Nigeria pushes through with transferring into assets that the Nigerian public collectively paid for over the years into control or ownership by the private sector. The batch of institutions lined up for the next firesale include NEPA, NNPC, NAA and the airports, Central Bank of Nigeria, Nigeria Stock Exchange, federal institutions of higher education, research institutes, and other core assets. Previously "failed" transfers like NITEL, Ajaokuta Steel works, NiPost and Nigeria Ports Authority will also be re-submitted. These were previously sold to "suit, suitcase, and suite" companies like Pentascope and Solgas. Those companies may well have their contracts renewed, as the akotileta government struggles to sell unfavoured assets into depressed world markets.
Nigeria may do well to ask why they consider themselves so smart when consecutive governments are getting away with sovereign murder.
Everything that is not rooted to the ground is being sold off. Even forestry rights are being sold off and farmland given away while government officials import basic foodstuff from all over the world. AT THIS RATE, NIGERIANS WILL SOON BECOME THE WORLD'S FIRST TOTALLY PREPAY ECONOMY. They will have to pay for their services twice, thrice, multiple times over, before they have any chance of using such services. Sometimes they will not get the services they paid such extortionate rates for. They will have nobody to complain to and no redress if they bother. Sounds like the GSM industry? Wait and see. The people in this country face the chilling prospect that, in a few year time, they will be taxed or charged to pay for national debts that are not secured by any national assets or national revenues.
If unchecked, the mugging going on may result in the entire country in slavery-plantation conditions. Current international market conditions are not appropriate for any country to be undertaking privatisations. Nigeria's assets are internationally denominated in USA dollars. That currency is in free fall in world markets. Yet its value is rising against the Naira in local markets. Why? Nigeria has to import everything and its trade is denominated in USD. So importers must buy USD no matter what.
Businesses are no better run or less corrupt just because they are operated by the private sector. Witness the meltdown of Enron (USA), Arthur Anderson (UK/USA), savings and loans industry (USA), railway privatisation (UK), pension funds (UK), Fannie Mae (USA), Common Agricultural Policy (EU) and other multi-billion private-sector frauds.
Even the average person knows that a time of penury is not the best time to seek a bank loan or negotiate a decent deal from a pawnbroker. The privatisation madness and economic liberalisation crassness should stop, if only to give Nigerians a chance to run their own affairs. The current management of many public companies slated for privatisation will do a decent job if the government gives them a management contract and then pays its way like any other consumer. History indicates that privatised ownership or control of Nigerian people's assets results in disdain and abuse of the people's interests. Already the beneficiaries of Nigerian Airways giveaway are saying that no Nigerian should expect a high level appointment in the Virgin Airways (UK).
Presumably, the president and senior government officials of Nigeria will shamelessly sit in first class while their people in coach class are "flitted" with deodorants and pesticides like dirty coachroaches on flights leaving the country.
The advocates of these mugging activities are dangerous to our national wealth. They would be roundly denounced in any sensible society and they would be forced to leave positons of such responsibility. But the intellectuals of this country are slavering over scraps just so they can feel priviledged.
Paradoxically, the privations may be the making ot the Nigerian people. The continued spate of privatisations will almost certainly remove the last vestiges of common interests from the populace. At last, the colonial-era construct may render and free its progressive elements to pursue alternative political arrangements. This need not be a BAD thing. Witness Somalia, so lawless since 1991 to date. It has the most connected telecommunications and air transport market in Africa, entirely because the lawlessness prevented akotileta governments from attaining national power. Somalia has the cheapest national and international calling rates in Africa. It takes three days to connect a landline telephone. Every warlord had to look after his people. So he allowed enterprises to thrive in this fiefdom and taxed them. The national airports destroyed? Warlords built private airstrips and jetties using Somalian engineers. Now that the country has a "president", nobody dares use foreign engineers to build roads, bridges, buildings, and other basic civil infrastructure. How unlike our Julius Berger capital!
Somalia has learnt the lessons of national strategic interests the hard way. If Somalia had oil, their engineers will dominate the oil sector. If they fix their airline, would you bet against Somalian pilots, crew and check-in staff? You CAN bet that no jumped-up foreigner will dare "flit" a flight to or from Somalia!
Links:
http://p221.ezboard.com/fnigeriadiscussionsfrm2.showMessage?topicID=791.topic
___________________
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
Ibiti Owo Ise Wa Nigbati Ashewo NEEDS Lati Sope Owo Tan
How to raise business finance when the bank NEEDS to say no
It is the 2nd (ikeji) of the Enterprising Communities series to be published by ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERRISES. This series aims to assist African enterpreneurs in building business enterprises based on innovations in science, technology, engineering and medicine.
HOW TO RAISE BUSINESS FINANCE WHEN THE BANK "NEEDS" TO SAY NO.
Introduction:
A person who works in a bank is a worker, not a banker. It is the people who own (equity shares in) the bank that are bankers. The Enterprising Communities series shows you how to raise funds for an enterprise in your community, when the bank and its workers only want to buy and sell foreign exchange . . .
Article:
These days, it is likely that the bank located in your community NEEDS to do business mainly with multinational enterprises. An examination of the structure of enterprise economy in many African countries reveals three distinct layers: the multinational trading companies; a small middle tier of brokers, and vendors of non-tradable services; and a vast community of family-controlled enterprises. Only the multinationals can readily do business with our banks, precisely because the multinationals have access to vast capital resources of their own. They use the banks only to pay local employees, suppliers and brokers.
The banks for their part think they are too big for the community enterprises. Rather than investing in and supporting community enterprises with appropriate lending, savings and leasing schemes, our banks are attuned to become "globally competitive". As a whole, Africa generates some 5pc of global trade. There are regional development authorities or states elsewhere with far greater impact on global trade flows. For example, the land mass of all of Western Europe will fit within the borders of Sudan alone. But financially, all of Sudan is smaller than Birmingham UK or Birmingham USA. In the same vein, Texas USA generates some 30pc of USA's USD 3 trillion GDP. That is more than productivity of all Africa other than Nigeria and South Africa. Yet the main operations of our banks rarely extend beyond fishing for deposits, round-tripping of foreign currency, and daisy-chaining of import-export financing letters. These banks make it difficult for community enterprises to operate bank accounts. They don't want you dirtying their marble floor-to-ceiling lobbies. As a result, many enterprises do their business in cash. They buy, sell, lend and collect cash payments. Businesspeople travel with large sums of cash. Politicians settle issues with bags of cash. Major capital expenditures are financed in cash. Only a small portion of this cash enters the formal banking system.
Here then is a guide to raisng funds for community enteprises.
Many middle-tier enterprises conduct the bulk of their business with one or two trade suppliers. It is not uncommon that 70pc to 80pc of supplies for your beer brokerage comes from one supplier. Community enterprises tend to have a more varied distribution of suppliers and customers. Your metal-working workshop may source wrought iron from any number of metal vendors and sell ornamental gates to any number of home-improvers. These trading patterns signify three vibrant sources of business funding for your enterprise, without you needing to exhange dirty looks with a bank worker: vendor finance, supplier finance, and customer prepay finance.
Vendor finance is when the manufacturer of a product gives you some time to sell the product before you pay the manufacturer. The longer you have traded with a manufacturer, the better terms of this "credit" you will likely get. Vendor finance is not likely from your local bukateria (restaurant) where the product is consumed immediately, is not fungible, and is not recoverable. In fact you may see a prominent display that signals "Do not ask for credit as refusal often offends". You should request vendor finance from manufacturers of products that are durable, relatively expensive, and are physically discrete. Such products include stoves, water tanks, car parts, and houses. Although the product is in your possession, its ownership remains with the manufacturer until it is sold. If you are unable to sell the product as agreed, the manufacturer is able to recover the product from your possession and try a more successful trader.
Supplier finance is when a wholesaler, importer or other big trading company supplies you with products or services and gives you some time before you have to pay. This type of financing is the most common in many business-to-business transactions in African markets. Usually ownership and control responsibility for the products become yours. You usually have to pay your supplier when your credit period is due, whether or not you have succeeded in selling the products. Supplier financing tends to cover products with same properties as vendor finance.
Customer prepay finance is when your customer pays before you release your goods and services. This is the type of financing most commonly available to the owner-manager of a bukateria, butchers, small hotel and other open market community enterprises. Interestingly, it is the becoming the most preferred payment mechanism deployed by multinational trading enterprises in African markets. Many Africans do not have credit records or bank accounts. They do not own bank cards or credit cards. They do not own passports or identity cards. They may not even have discernable addresses, as there are no centralised street maps or postal codes. Yet, multinationals know there is plenty-plenty money to be made in your community. Solution: they sell you prepayment cards which you then use, instead of credit or debit cards, to pay for their products.
So how applicable are these funding sources in helping your business enterprise?
You may get vendor finance if your business is resale of capital goods. You should find supplier financing is readily accessible if you deal in fast moving consumer goods. You are already getting customer prepay finance if your business trades on "money for hand" basis. Of course, combinations of all three business financing sources is possible.
When you have ambitions to grow your product-based business, you should consider offering vendor or supplier finance to your business customers. You may be pleased to find significant increases in business volume compensate for delays in getting your cash up-front. You will need to communicate more with your buyers and help develop their business e.g by identifying emerging markets for your products. Do not offer vendor or supplier finance to home consumers.
If your business provides services to a wide range of end-user customers, you should consider introducing a prepayment accounts system tiered to price discounts. For example, you run a restaurant, hotel or mechanic workshop and want to expand your business but don't have the money. Your customers always tell you they really appreciate your food, room service, or car tuning. They only wish you were closer to where they live or work. Bless them. Tell them you want to open a shop near them and are offering discounts on any of your shops to those who pay in advance. Offer 5pc to 10pc discounts for 13weeks or 6months prepayments, respectively. Always issue a computer-printed prepayment voucher that proclaims this offer, and issue a receipt. Use the money to build and furnish your shop. This is the way multinationals fund their GSM "foreign" investments: it is the community paying. Hardly any new money is brought into the community. You can do it too, and you don't need a bank. You only need your regular customers.
Finally, you are advised to invest in information systems to keep track of your growing business, your suppliers, your products and services, and your customers more efficiently. Giving your suppliers and customers computer-generated records improves the profile of your business. Using information systems also helps you to monitor your income and expenditure, profits and losses, and cash flows, so that you know in advance when your enterprise will need money. You really need to plan your business better.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2004
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
It is the 2nd (ikeji) of the Enterprising Communities series to be published by ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERRISES. This series aims to assist African enterpreneurs in building business enterprises based on innovations in science, technology, engineering and medicine.
HOW TO RAISE BUSINESS FINANCE WHEN THE BANK "NEEDS" TO SAY NO.
Introduction:
A person who works in a bank is a worker, not a banker. It is the people who own (equity shares in) the bank that are bankers. The Enterprising Communities series shows you how to raise funds for an enterprise in your community, when the bank and its workers only want to buy and sell foreign exchange . . .
Article:
These days, it is likely that the bank located in your community NEEDS to do business mainly with multinational enterprises. An examination of the structure of enterprise economy in many African countries reveals three distinct layers: the multinational trading companies; a small middle tier of brokers, and vendors of non-tradable services; and a vast community of family-controlled enterprises. Only the multinationals can readily do business with our banks, precisely because the multinationals have access to vast capital resources of their own. They use the banks only to pay local employees, suppliers and brokers.
The banks for their part think they are too big for the community enterprises. Rather than investing in and supporting community enterprises with appropriate lending, savings and leasing schemes, our banks are attuned to become "globally competitive". As a whole, Africa generates some 5pc of global trade. There are regional development authorities or states elsewhere with far greater impact on global trade flows. For example, the land mass of all of Western Europe will fit within the borders of Sudan alone. But financially, all of Sudan is smaller than Birmingham UK or Birmingham USA. In the same vein, Texas USA generates some 30pc of USA's USD 3 trillion GDP. That is more than productivity of all Africa other than Nigeria and South Africa. Yet the main operations of our banks rarely extend beyond fishing for deposits, round-tripping of foreign currency, and daisy-chaining of import-export financing letters. These banks make it difficult for community enterprises to operate bank accounts. They don't want you dirtying their marble floor-to-ceiling lobbies. As a result, many enterprises do their business in cash. They buy, sell, lend and collect cash payments. Businesspeople travel with large sums of cash. Politicians settle issues with bags of cash. Major capital expenditures are financed in cash. Only a small portion of this cash enters the formal banking system.
Here then is a guide to raisng funds for community enteprises.
Many middle-tier enterprises conduct the bulk of their business with one or two trade suppliers. It is not uncommon that 70pc to 80pc of supplies for your beer brokerage comes from one supplier. Community enterprises tend to have a more varied distribution of suppliers and customers. Your metal-working workshop may source wrought iron from any number of metal vendors and sell ornamental gates to any number of home-improvers. These trading patterns signify three vibrant sources of business funding for your enterprise, without you needing to exhange dirty looks with a bank worker: vendor finance, supplier finance, and customer prepay finance.
Vendor finance is when the manufacturer of a product gives you some time to sell the product before you pay the manufacturer. The longer you have traded with a manufacturer, the better terms of this "credit" you will likely get. Vendor finance is not likely from your local bukateria (restaurant) where the product is consumed immediately, is not fungible, and is not recoverable. In fact you may see a prominent display that signals "Do not ask for credit as refusal often offends". You should request vendor finance from manufacturers of products that are durable, relatively expensive, and are physically discrete. Such products include stoves, water tanks, car parts, and houses. Although the product is in your possession, its ownership remains with the manufacturer until it is sold. If you are unable to sell the product as agreed, the manufacturer is able to recover the product from your possession and try a more successful trader.
Supplier finance is when a wholesaler, importer or other big trading company supplies you with products or services and gives you some time before you have to pay. This type of financing is the most common in many business-to-business transactions in African markets. Usually ownership and control responsibility for the products become yours. You usually have to pay your supplier when your credit period is due, whether or not you have succeeded in selling the products. Supplier financing tends to cover products with same properties as vendor finance.
Customer prepay finance is when your customer pays before you release your goods and services. This is the type of financing most commonly available to the owner-manager of a bukateria, butchers, small hotel and other open market community enterprises. Interestingly, it is the becoming the most preferred payment mechanism deployed by multinational trading enterprises in African markets. Many Africans do not have credit records or bank accounts. They do not own bank cards or credit cards. They do not own passports or identity cards. They may not even have discernable addresses, as there are no centralised street maps or postal codes. Yet, multinationals know there is plenty-plenty money to be made in your community. Solution: they sell you prepayment cards which you then use, instead of credit or debit cards, to pay for their products.
So how applicable are these funding sources in helping your business enterprise?
You may get vendor finance if your business is resale of capital goods. You should find supplier financing is readily accessible if you deal in fast moving consumer goods. You are already getting customer prepay finance if your business trades on "money for hand" basis. Of course, combinations of all three business financing sources is possible.
When you have ambitions to grow your product-based business, you should consider offering vendor or supplier finance to your business customers. You may be pleased to find significant increases in business volume compensate for delays in getting your cash up-front. You will need to communicate more with your buyers and help develop their business e.g by identifying emerging markets for your products. Do not offer vendor or supplier finance to home consumers.
If your business provides services to a wide range of end-user customers, you should consider introducing a prepayment accounts system tiered to price discounts. For example, you run a restaurant, hotel or mechanic workshop and want to expand your business but don't have the money. Your customers always tell you they really appreciate your food, room service, or car tuning. They only wish you were closer to where they live or work. Bless them. Tell them you want to open a shop near them and are offering discounts on any of your shops to those who pay in advance. Offer 5pc to 10pc discounts for 13weeks or 6months prepayments, respectively. Always issue a computer-printed prepayment voucher that proclaims this offer, and issue a receipt. Use the money to build and furnish your shop. This is the way multinationals fund their GSM "foreign" investments: it is the community paying. Hardly any new money is brought into the community. You can do it too, and you don't need a bank. You only need your regular customers.
Finally, you are advised to invest in information systems to keep track of your growing business, your suppliers, your products and services, and your customers more efficiently. Giving your suppliers and customers computer-generated records improves the profile of your business. Using information systems also helps you to monitor your income and expenditure, profits and losses, and cash flows, so that you know in advance when your enterprise will need money. You really need to plan your business better.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2004
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
How Africa NEEDS t'AGOA'bout competing in this NEPAD age.
How Africa NEEDS t'AGOA'bout competing in this NEPAD age.
Introduction:
African businesses must sometimes feel they are being led to slaugther. For many, the firm belief is that the economic policies emanating from our governments have significantly removed both government subsidies and eroded private sector purchasing power. Yet, African businesses can turn the flood of misguided policies into as source of competitive advantage, with a change in market and cultural orientation.
Article:
Are we being led to slaughter? Are those appointed to lead our flock selling us to the butchers? Do the butchers intend to take payment in our flesh and blood? Home-grown analysts of the terms under which African businesses engage in international trade, may wsll answer yes, yes and yes. We have the power. We must have the will. We must also frustrate the actions of those who assign a low-value role to our interests in international trade
Article:
Those who celebrate religions by symbolically cannibalising their orisha need not worry; this article is not about blind faith. Rather it is about misguided and downright treacherous agitations about economic progress.
The National Economic Empowermeent and Development Strategy (NEEDS) programme of the Nigerian government will not deliver either economic prosperity or social stability to the Nigerian people. The marketing is slick but this is stale wine in new packaging.
The programme is wrong because the model it is based on is unreplicable and because it is inimical to the progressive interests of Nigerians.
Let us distinguish the stakeholders in NEEDS. The proclaimed primary beneficiaries are the Nigerian people. This programme will supposedly deliver the people from economic dependence on elected government by privaising all public owned institutions. The operators of NEEDS are the government officials, mainly in the financial sector and multilateral agencies, particularly the IMF, the WB and the Clubs of moneylenders. The sponsors of NEEDS are the international community of international governments and companies who will gain trading benefits from transacting in newly liberalised markets.
NEEDS proclaims: export driven trade, full employment, transparent accountancy, etc. It does not address the cultural, military and social is built on a model with the following premises:
# All countries should industrialise along the European model, so industrial-age technology must be transferred to Nigerians;
# Domestic savings should fund acquisition and application of technology; high interest rates will encourage people to save their funds in the banks;
# The national savings rate is low, so foreign aid and foreign investment must be procured;
# Much industrial-age technology is now obsolete, so foreign technical assistance must be retained to implement technological breakthroughs and assist Nigeria to leap-frog gaps in domestic technical capability;
savings. encouraging people to build savings in order to afford labour-saving machinery, use industrial technologies in creating jobs, manufacturing and exporting goods so that Nigeria and Africa must follow an alternative route to socio-economic improvement than that mapped by the sponsors of NEEDS. The structure of economic opportunity is
State aim of needs. Proposed implementation of needs. Likely impact of implementation. Non-needs alternative
Linkshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Nigeria needs to succeed
But development isn't just a question of making markets and economic policy work better. We now know that investing in people - in their health and nutrition, and in their education and training - is an indispensable part of good economic policy. - Tony Blair, Britain leader.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2003
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
Introduction:
African businesses must sometimes feel they are being led to slaugther. For many, the firm belief is that the economic policies emanating from our governments have significantly removed both government subsidies and eroded private sector purchasing power. Yet, African businesses can turn the flood of misguided policies into as source of competitive advantage, with a change in market and cultural orientation.
Article:
Are we being led to slaughter? Are those appointed to lead our flock selling us to the butchers? Do the butchers intend to take payment in our flesh and blood? Home-grown analysts of the terms under which African businesses engage in international trade, may wsll answer yes, yes and yes. We have the power. We must have the will. We must also frustrate the actions of those who assign a low-value role to our interests in international trade
Article:
Those who celebrate religions by symbolically cannibalising their orisha need not worry; this article is not about blind faith. Rather it is about misguided and downright treacherous agitations about economic progress.
The National Economic Empowermeent and Development Strategy (NEEDS) programme of the Nigerian government will not deliver either economic prosperity or social stability to the Nigerian people. The marketing is slick but this is stale wine in new packaging.
The programme is wrong because the model it is based on is unreplicable and because it is inimical to the progressive interests of Nigerians.
Let us distinguish the stakeholders in NEEDS. The proclaimed primary beneficiaries are the Nigerian people. This programme will supposedly deliver the people from economic dependence on elected government by privaising all public owned institutions. The operators of NEEDS are the government officials, mainly in the financial sector and multilateral agencies, particularly the IMF, the WB and the Clubs of moneylenders. The sponsors of NEEDS are the international community of international governments and companies who will gain trading benefits from transacting in newly liberalised markets.
NEEDS proclaims: export driven trade, full employment, transparent accountancy, etc. It does not address the cultural, military and social is built on a model with the following premises:
# All countries should industrialise along the European model, so industrial-age technology must be transferred to Nigerians;
# Domestic savings should fund acquisition and application of technology; high interest rates will encourage people to save their funds in the banks;
# The national savings rate is low, so foreign aid and foreign investment must be procured;
# Much industrial-age technology is now obsolete, so foreign technical assistance must be retained to implement technological breakthroughs and assist Nigeria to leap-frog gaps in domestic technical capability;
savings. encouraging people to build savings in order to afford labour-saving machinery, use industrial technologies in creating jobs, manufacturing and exporting goods so that Nigeria and Africa must follow an alternative route to socio-economic improvement than that mapped by the sponsors of NEEDS. The structure of economic opportunity is
State aim of needs. Proposed implementation of needs. Likely impact of implementation. Non-needs alternative
Linkshttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Nigeria needs to succeed
But development isn't just a question of making markets and economic policy work better. We now know that investing in people - in their health and nutrition, and in their education and training - is an indispensable part of good economic policy. - Tony Blair, Britain leader.
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES. Enterprising Communities.
Copyright (c) ALARAN DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2003
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached.
Ejo Oja Eru Ni Europe
The Story of the (European) Slave Trade
The Slave trade, started by the Portuguese in the middle of the 15th Century closely followed by the Spaniards, and at a longer interval (1562) by the British, then in quick succession by the Dutch (about 1620), the French (about 1640), the Swedes, Danes and Prussians, attained the full extent of its terrible activities in the 18th Century.
The earliest beginnings of the traffic were marked rather by an admixture of religious bigotry and love of adventure than by sordid motives. The passion for geographical discovery which inspired the famous Henry the Navigator of Portugal, great grandson of our Edward III., was the originating cause of a hideous and protracted tragedy. The captains of two of Prince Henry's exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed. The ancient Portuguese chronicles recording them resemble the literature of the Crusaders. The African was a heathen, and as such fair game for the prowess of the noble Christian Knights who opposed their steel breast-plates, tempered swords and cross-bows, to his bare chest and primitive spear. Here is a typical account of one of these predatory forays:
Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice.... And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labour and expense; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that He had willed to give them such a victory, and with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that He had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people.
Thus did Europe first bring the "glad tidings" to the African. It did not take long to ascertain that the spiritual consolation derived from converting the African to Christianity had its utilitarian counterpart. He made an excellent labourer. Thenceforth every newly-returned caravel brought its quota of miserable captives, and a brisk traffic grew up, Lagos in Southern Portugal becoming the principal slave mart.
That was the first stage. The second began with the discovery of America by Columbus, and of gold in the Island of Haiti, which the Spaniards termed Hispaniola. The aboriginal Caribs and Aranaks proving either intractable or useless as labourers, the Spaniards contracted with the Portuguese for supplies of Africans. Thus, in the opening years of the 16th Century, the black man was transported across the Atlantic and flung into that "New World," where he was fated to suffer such unspeakable agonies and which he has fertilised to such purpose, and for ultimate ends still concealed from the vision of prophecy, with his blood and tears and sweat.
For some years the Spaniards continued to employ the Portuguese as intermediaries for their African slaves. But with the extension of their conquests in the West Indies and on the American mainland, the demand for additional human material to exploit the natural riches of the country, gold and silver, precious stones and spices, waxed incessantly. The Spanish Sovereigns thereupon inaugurated a. system of special contracts ("Assiento") which became of international significance, and under which they bestowed from time to time the monopoly of the supply of Africans for their American possessions upon foreign nations, corporations, or individuals, who in turn employed sub-contractors.
In 1562 the first British sub-contractor appeared on the scene in the person of John Hawkins, and with Queen Elizabeth as sleeping partner, embarked on his career of murder and brigandage in the good ship "Jesus," lent him by his Royal confederate. Ten years later Elizabeth knighted him as a reward for his persistent energies -- contemporaneously described as "going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."
The century which followed saw the breakdown of Spain's attempted imperial monopoly of the Americas, and of Portugal's attempted imperial monopoly of the African Seas; nascent British and French Empires rising across the Atlantic; adventurous spirits of many nationalities hastening towards the New World, and British, French, Danes and Dutch disputing for mastery at countless points on the West African Coast. And throughout that period the trade in African flesh and blood grew steadily in volume. Towards the middle of the 17th Century the British became direct exporters, both from the West Coast through "The African Company," and from the Mediterranean Coast of Morocco through "The Company of Barbary Merchants," among whose directors were the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The French, Dutch, and Danes were then exporting considerable numbers of slaves from the settlements they had founded on the West Coast to their respective possessions in the West Indies and on the mainland, to work the sugar and coffee plantations. The Swedish effort at slave trading was short-lived as was the Prussian. A curious, isolated attempt on the part of one of the German Baltic Barons also came to nothing.
One can only speculate as to the total number of unfortunate Africans torn from their homes between 1442 and 1700, or as to the number that perished in the course of transportation on the slave ships -- the "middle passage" of infamous memory -- when:
the slaves could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs ... not infrequently would go mad before dying of suffocation ... in their frenzy some killed others in the hopes of procuring more room to breathe ... men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each others' brains.
These horrors were intensified a thousandfold when the trade became an international offence.
It is computed in American records that the British were responsible in the twenty years, 1680-1700, for importing 300,000 Africans into the West Indies and the mainland.
But with the dawn of the 18th Century the trade assumed gigantic proportions. It had been thrown open two years previously "to all British subjects," and a swarm of speculators competed to meet the ever-increasing demand from the American plantations, which were now yielding enormous quantities of tropical produce, thanks entirely to this African slave labour. The risks for those engaged in the actual operations were not inconsiderable: but the profits were correspondingly large. Thenceforth the slave trade "occupied the very foremost part in English policy," and became a predominant concern of our foreign policy. This was clearly shown in the Treaty of Utrecht which closed, in 1713, the needlessly prolonged war of the Spanish Succession in which England, Austria, and the United Netherlands opposed Louis XIV. and Philip V. The part of the Treaty which gave "unqualified and unanimous satisfaction at home" was the "Assiento" compact, whereby England secured from Philip, in accordance with the practice of the Spanish Sovereigns referred to above, an "absolute monopoly of the supply of slaves to the Spanish Colonies." The monopoly was conferred by the British Government upon the South Sea Company. The "immense amount of guilty wealth acquired through the 'Assiento' Treaty did much to compensate for the great pecuniary sacrifices of the war." The generation which concluded it came to regard the "extension of the slave trade as a capital object of English commercial policy," and it became the "main object" of national policy to "encourage the kidnaping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery." In fact the Peace which brought a precarious and short-lived truce to Europe, brought war, war of the most atrocious and desolating character, and on a scale until then unimagined, to Africa, and "made of England the great slave trader of the world."
The tradition persisted all through the century. Chatham made the development of the trade a main object of his policy, and "boasted that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in British hands." Even Pitt, after the war with France which broke French sea-power, annihilated the French slave trade, shattered the French Colonial Empire and made us its heirs, went back upon the position he had precedently assumed [under the influence of Wilberforce] in the teeth of the opposition of three of his colleagues supported by George III. The result was that "in consequence of the British conquests and under the shelter of the British flag, the slave trade became more active than ever," and that under Pitt the English slave trade "more than doubled."
A considerable number of statistics are available from various sources covering the activities of the trade during the 18th Century and the closing years of the 17th, which give some idea of the stupendous havoc wrought in Africa -- almost entirely Western Africa -- during that period. The following have been selected from the most reliable authors, but they are only approximately consecutive:
1666-1766. -- Number of slaves imported by the British alone into British, French, and Spanish American Colonies -- three millions (quarter of a million died on the voyage).
1680-1786. -- Slaves imported into the British American Colonies -- 2,130,000, Jamaica alone absorbing 610,000.
1716-1756. -- An average of 70,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 3,500,000.
1752-1762. -- Jamaica alone imported 71,115 slaves.
1759-1762. -- Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves.
1776-1800. -- An average of 74,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 1,850,000. (Annual average: by British 38 000 ; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; French, 20,000; Danes, 2,000.)
Some notion can be formed of the profits of the trade by taking selected cases. From about 1730, Liverpool began for various reasons to eclipse both London and Bristol as the chief English centre of the trade. In the eleven years, 1783-1793, 921 Liverpool ships were employed in the convoying of slaves. They carried 303,737 slaves of the total value of £15,186,850. After deducting 15 per cent. under divers heads, the net return to Liverpool in those eleven years amounted to £12,294,116, or an average of £1,117,647 per annum. The net profit to those actually engaged in the trade was £2,361,455 6s. 1d., or an average of £214,677 15s. 1d. per annum.
There was, of course, a double profit upon the value of the slave when sold in the West Indies, and upon articles of British manufacture -- largely cotton goods -- disposed of in Africa for the slave's purchase: Manchester merchants largely profited from the latter. It is computed that from 1750 to 1800, one-fourth of the ships belonging to the port of Liverpool were employed in the slave trade: Liverpool monopolised five-eighths of the British slave trade, and three-sevenths of the total slave trade of the world.
These figures do not, of course, convey any true impression of the horrors and of the devastation involved in securing the slaves in Africa, or of the cruelties attending their treatment in the West India Islands and on the mainland of America. The trade had grown so large that mere kidnaping raids conducted by white men in the immediate neighbourhood of the coast-line were quite insufficient to meet its requirements. Regions inaccessible to the European had to be tapped by the organisation of civil wars. The whole of the immense region from the Senegal to the Congo, and even further south, became in the course of years convulsed by incessant internecine struggles. A vast tumult reigned from one extremity to the other of the most populous and fertile portions of the continent. Tribe was bribed to fight tribe, community to raid community. To every native chief, as to every one of his subjects, was held out the prospect of gain at the expense of his neighbour. Tribal feuds and individual hatreds were alike intensified, and while wide stretches of countryside were systematically ravaged by organised bands of raiders armed with muskets, "hunting down victims for the English trader whose blasting influence, like some malignant providence extended over mighty regions where the face of a white man was never seen," the trade put within the reach of the individual the means of satisfying a personal grudge and of ministering to a private vengeance.
The direct loss of life which this perennial warfare inevitably necessitated must have been enormous in itself, to say nothing of the indirect loss through the destruction of crops and granaries incidental to it, and the consequent starvation ensuing. The transport to the coast by land and water of an incessant stream of shackled captives, over distances extending to many hundreds of miles, must have been even more ruinous. It has been estimated that something like 30 per cent. of the captives perished before reaching the coast, where the exhausted and emaciated survivors were crowded like cattle in barracoons waiting for a slave ship, whose arrival meant for them the still more terrible agonies of the "middle passage."
Throughout the century did this imported hurricane make furious havoc in the forests, plains and valleys of Western Africa, flinging the human wreckage upon the distant shores of the "New" Continent. Arrogantly and savagely did England's rulers oppose the multiplying evidence of aversion exhibited by the North American colonists at the black flood which England poured upon their country, a policy persisted in until the eve of the War of Independence. "We cannot allow," declared Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in reply to one of these remonstrances, in 1775, "the Colonies to check or to discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation."
Lord Dartmouth was merely giving expression to what, since the Peace of Utrecht, had become the fixed national policy. He was supported by the spirit of the time. The monarchy, the aristocracy, the commercial world, and ecclesiasticism, alike, defended the slave trade and directly benefited therefrom.
Queen Anne saw no objection, it is said, to increase her dowry, like her celebrated predecessor, from its operations. A statute of King William of pious memory affirms that "the trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom"; another of George II. declares it to be "very advantageous to Great Britain," and "necessary to the plantations," while the "Society for propagating Christianity," including half the episcopal bench, derived, as masters, from the labour of their slaves in the West Indies, an income which they spent in "teaching the religion of peace and goodwill to men."
England continued to be "the great slave trader of the world," until a handful of her sons, humane and determined men, compelled her to gaze into the depths of the Hell the greed of her ruling and trading classes had done so much to create.
The treatment of the transported African varied considerably. There is a concensus of opinion that he fared best under the Portuguese, the Danes, the French and the Spaniards, and worse under the Dutch and the British. The abuses, the immoralities, the tortures practised upon the slaves, and the fierce outbreaks to which they occasionally gave rise, fill hundreds of volumes. They seemed to have reached the height of their intensity in Dutch Guiana and the British West Indies. "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."
It would be beyond the scope of this volume to deal with the long struggle waged by Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, and others against the trade, the gradual awakening of the public conscience to its infamies, and the final triumph of the reformers. To Burke, more than to any man, is probably due the changed mental attitude of England towards the rights and the wrongs of coloured peoples, which ultimately enabled the efforts of Wilberforce and his colleagues to attain fruition. In Sir Charles Dilke's incessant labours for the same ends during the closing years of the 19th, and the opening years of the 20th Century, a later generation will perceive more vividly perhaps than does the present one, the persistence of a Parliamentary tradition which he helped to undo something of the evils of official England's African record, and caused her in recent years to give to the colonising Governments of Europe as good an example, on the whole, as the bad one she so long personified. But neither the vigour which Britain showed in the early part of last century in stamping out the slave trade which had conduced so largely to her prosperity in the previous one nor her condemnation of its revival in inverted form on the Congo, nor the comparatively better treatment she has meted out to her coloured subjects during the past half century would qualify her, in view of her terrible past performances, to exercise the functions of judge in relation to the offences of her contemporaries.
Nor are Britain's hands wholly clean to-day. The hands of every European Power which has had dealings with him is stained deep with the blood of the African. For any such Power to approach the African problem on the morrow of the Great War otherwise than with a consciousness of past sins, would be to proclaim itself hypocrite in the eyes of the world. What Britons may legitimately hope for from their rulers is that British policy, devoid of pharisaism, may be directed patiently, strenuously and unselfishly to the task of providing for the long persecuted black man and his descendants a future of hope, promise and assured security.
Citation: Morel, E. D. The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920; BoondocksNet Edition, 2001). http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/morel
-------------------
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
This material is copy from BoondockNet website [04.02.2005].
The Slave trade, started by the Portuguese in the middle of the 15th Century closely followed by the Spaniards, and at a longer interval (1562) by the British, then in quick succession by the Dutch (about 1620), the French (about 1640), the Swedes, Danes and Prussians, attained the full extent of its terrible activities in the 18th Century.
The earliest beginnings of the traffic were marked rather by an admixture of religious bigotry and love of adventure than by sordid motives. The passion for geographical discovery which inspired the famous Henry the Navigator of Portugal, great grandson of our Edward III., was the originating cause of a hideous and protracted tragedy. The captains of two of Prince Henry's exploring caravels brought back with them to Lisbon in 1442 a dozen Africans, whom they had captured on the West Coast in the course of a wholly unprovoked attack upon an African village. Further exploits of a similar kind followed. The ancient Portuguese chronicles recording them resemble the literature of the Crusaders. The African was a heathen, and as such fair game for the prowess of the noble Christian Knights who opposed their steel breast-plates, tempered swords and cross-bows, to his bare chest and primitive spear. Here is a typical account of one of these predatory forays:
Then might you see mothers forsaking their children and husbands their wives, each striving to escape as best he could. Some drowned themselves in the water, others thought to escape by hiding under their huts; others stowed their children among the sea-weed, where our men found them afterwards, hoping they would thus escape notice.... And at last our Lord God, who giveth a reward for every good deed, willed that for the toil they had undergone in His service they should that day obtain victory over their enemies, as well as a guerdon and a payment for all their labour and expense; for they took captive of those Moors, what with men, women and children, 165, besides those that perished and were killed. And when the battle was over, all praised God for the great mercy He had shown them, in that He had willed to give them such a victory, and with so little damage to themselves. They were all very joyful, praising loudly the Lord God for that He had deigned to give such help to such a handful of His Christian people.
Thus did Europe first bring the "glad tidings" to the African. It did not take long to ascertain that the spiritual consolation derived from converting the African to Christianity had its utilitarian counterpart. He made an excellent labourer. Thenceforth every newly-returned caravel brought its quota of miserable captives, and a brisk traffic grew up, Lagos in Southern Portugal becoming the principal slave mart.
That was the first stage. The second began with the discovery of America by Columbus, and of gold in the Island of Haiti, which the Spaniards termed Hispaniola. The aboriginal Caribs and Aranaks proving either intractable or useless as labourers, the Spaniards contracted with the Portuguese for supplies of Africans. Thus, in the opening years of the 16th Century, the black man was transported across the Atlantic and flung into that "New World," where he was fated to suffer such unspeakable agonies and which he has fertilised to such purpose, and for ultimate ends still concealed from the vision of prophecy, with his blood and tears and sweat.
For some years the Spaniards continued to employ the Portuguese as intermediaries for their African slaves. But with the extension of their conquests in the West Indies and on the American mainland, the demand for additional human material to exploit the natural riches of the country, gold and silver, precious stones and spices, waxed incessantly. The Spanish Sovereigns thereupon inaugurated a. system of special contracts ("Assiento") which became of international significance, and under which they bestowed from time to time the monopoly of the supply of Africans for their American possessions upon foreign nations, corporations, or individuals, who in turn employed sub-contractors.
In 1562 the first British sub-contractor appeared on the scene in the person of John Hawkins, and with Queen Elizabeth as sleeping partner, embarked on his career of murder and brigandage in the good ship "Jesus," lent him by his Royal confederate. Ten years later Elizabeth knighted him as a reward for his persistent energies -- contemporaneously described as "going every day on shore to take the inhabitants with burning and spoiling their towns."
The century which followed saw the breakdown of Spain's attempted imperial monopoly of the Americas, and of Portugal's attempted imperial monopoly of the African Seas; nascent British and French Empires rising across the Atlantic; adventurous spirits of many nationalities hastening towards the New World, and British, French, Danes and Dutch disputing for mastery at countless points on the West African Coast. And throughout that period the trade in African flesh and blood grew steadily in volume. Towards the middle of the 17th Century the British became direct exporters, both from the West Coast through "The African Company," and from the Mediterranean Coast of Morocco through "The Company of Barbary Merchants," among whose directors were the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. The French, Dutch, and Danes were then exporting considerable numbers of slaves from the settlements they had founded on the West Coast to their respective possessions in the West Indies and on the mainland, to work the sugar and coffee plantations. The Swedish effort at slave trading was short-lived as was the Prussian. A curious, isolated attempt on the part of one of the German Baltic Barons also came to nothing.
One can only speculate as to the total number of unfortunate Africans torn from their homes between 1442 and 1700, or as to the number that perished in the course of transportation on the slave ships -- the "middle passage" of infamous memory -- when:
the slaves could not turn round, were wedged immovably, in fact, and chained to the deck by the neck and legs ... not infrequently would go mad before dying of suffocation ... in their frenzy some killed others in the hopes of procuring more room to breathe ... men strangled those next to them, and women drove nails into each others' brains.
These horrors were intensified a thousandfold when the trade became an international offence.
It is computed in American records that the British were responsible in the twenty years, 1680-1700, for importing 300,000 Africans into the West Indies and the mainland.
But with the dawn of the 18th Century the trade assumed gigantic proportions. It had been thrown open two years previously "to all British subjects," and a swarm of speculators competed to meet the ever-increasing demand from the American plantations, which were now yielding enormous quantities of tropical produce, thanks entirely to this African slave labour. The risks for those engaged in the actual operations were not inconsiderable: but the profits were correspondingly large. Thenceforth the slave trade "occupied the very foremost part in English policy," and became a predominant concern of our foreign policy. This was clearly shown in the Treaty of Utrecht which closed, in 1713, the needlessly prolonged war of the Spanish Succession in which England, Austria, and the United Netherlands opposed Louis XIV. and Philip V. The part of the Treaty which gave "unqualified and unanimous satisfaction at home" was the "Assiento" compact, whereby England secured from Philip, in accordance with the practice of the Spanish Sovereigns referred to above, an "absolute monopoly of the supply of slaves to the Spanish Colonies." The monopoly was conferred by the British Government upon the South Sea Company. The "immense amount of guilty wealth acquired through the 'Assiento' Treaty did much to compensate for the great pecuniary sacrifices of the war." The generation which concluded it came to regard the "extension of the slave trade as a capital object of English commercial policy," and it became the "main object" of national policy to "encourage the kidnaping of tens of thousands of negroes and their consignment to the most miserable slavery." In fact the Peace which brought a precarious and short-lived truce to Europe, brought war, war of the most atrocious and desolating character, and on a scale until then unimagined, to Africa, and "made of England the great slave trader of the world."
The tradition persisted all through the century. Chatham made the development of the trade a main object of his policy, and "boasted that his conquests in Africa had placed almost the whole slave trade in British hands." Even Pitt, after the war with France which broke French sea-power, annihilated the French slave trade, shattered the French Colonial Empire and made us its heirs, went back upon the position he had precedently assumed [under the influence of Wilberforce] in the teeth of the opposition of three of his colleagues supported by George III. The result was that "in consequence of the British conquests and under the shelter of the British flag, the slave trade became more active than ever," and that under Pitt the English slave trade "more than doubled."
A considerable number of statistics are available from various sources covering the activities of the trade during the 18th Century and the closing years of the 17th, which give some idea of the stupendous havoc wrought in Africa -- almost entirely Western Africa -- during that period. The following have been selected from the most reliable authors, but they are only approximately consecutive:
1666-1766. -- Number of slaves imported by the British alone into British, French, and Spanish American Colonies -- three millions (quarter of a million died on the voyage).
1680-1786. -- Slaves imported into the British American Colonies -- 2,130,000, Jamaica alone absorbing 610,000.
1716-1756. -- An average of 70,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 3,500,000.
1752-1762. -- Jamaica alone imported 71,115 slaves.
1759-1762. -- Guadeloupe alone imported 40,000 slaves.
1776-1800. -- An average of 74,000 slaves per annum imported into all the American Colonies, or a total of 1,850,000. (Annual average: by British 38 000 ; Portuguese, 10,000; Dutch, 4,000; French, 20,000; Danes, 2,000.)
Some notion can be formed of the profits of the trade by taking selected cases. From about 1730, Liverpool began for various reasons to eclipse both London and Bristol as the chief English centre of the trade. In the eleven years, 1783-1793, 921 Liverpool ships were employed in the convoying of slaves. They carried 303,737 slaves of the total value of £15,186,850. After deducting 15 per cent. under divers heads, the net return to Liverpool in those eleven years amounted to £12,294,116, or an average of £1,117,647 per annum. The net profit to those actually engaged in the trade was £2,361,455 6s. 1d., or an average of £214,677 15s. 1d. per annum.
There was, of course, a double profit upon the value of the slave when sold in the West Indies, and upon articles of British manufacture -- largely cotton goods -- disposed of in Africa for the slave's purchase: Manchester merchants largely profited from the latter. It is computed that from 1750 to 1800, one-fourth of the ships belonging to the port of Liverpool were employed in the slave trade: Liverpool monopolised five-eighths of the British slave trade, and three-sevenths of the total slave trade of the world.
These figures do not, of course, convey any true impression of the horrors and of the devastation involved in securing the slaves in Africa, or of the cruelties attending their treatment in the West India Islands and on the mainland of America. The trade had grown so large that mere kidnaping raids conducted by white men in the immediate neighbourhood of the coast-line were quite insufficient to meet its requirements. Regions inaccessible to the European had to be tapped by the organisation of civil wars. The whole of the immense region from the Senegal to the Congo, and even further south, became in the course of years convulsed by incessant internecine struggles. A vast tumult reigned from one extremity to the other of the most populous and fertile portions of the continent. Tribe was bribed to fight tribe, community to raid community. To every native chief, as to every one of his subjects, was held out the prospect of gain at the expense of his neighbour. Tribal feuds and individual hatreds were alike intensified, and while wide stretches of countryside were systematically ravaged by organised bands of raiders armed with muskets, "hunting down victims for the English trader whose blasting influence, like some malignant providence extended over mighty regions where the face of a white man was never seen," the trade put within the reach of the individual the means of satisfying a personal grudge and of ministering to a private vengeance.
The direct loss of life which this perennial warfare inevitably necessitated must have been enormous in itself, to say nothing of the indirect loss through the destruction of crops and granaries incidental to it, and the consequent starvation ensuing. The transport to the coast by land and water of an incessant stream of shackled captives, over distances extending to many hundreds of miles, must have been even more ruinous. It has been estimated that something like 30 per cent. of the captives perished before reaching the coast, where the exhausted and emaciated survivors were crowded like cattle in barracoons waiting for a slave ship, whose arrival meant for them the still more terrible agonies of the "middle passage."
Throughout the century did this imported hurricane make furious havoc in the forests, plains and valleys of Western Africa, flinging the human wreckage upon the distant shores of the "New" Continent. Arrogantly and savagely did England's rulers oppose the multiplying evidence of aversion exhibited by the North American colonists at the black flood which England poured upon their country, a policy persisted in until the eve of the War of Independence. "We cannot allow," declared Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in reply to one of these remonstrances, in 1775, "the Colonies to check or to discourage in any degree a traffic so beneficial to the nation."
Lord Dartmouth was merely giving expression to what, since the Peace of Utrecht, had become the fixed national policy. He was supported by the spirit of the time. The monarchy, the aristocracy, the commercial world, and ecclesiasticism, alike, defended the slave trade and directly benefited therefrom.
Queen Anne saw no objection, it is said, to increase her dowry, like her celebrated predecessor, from its operations. A statute of King William of pious memory affirms that "the trade was highly beneficial to the kingdom"; another of George II. declares it to be "very advantageous to Great Britain," and "necessary to the plantations," while the "Society for propagating Christianity," including half the episcopal bench, derived, as masters, from the labour of their slaves in the West Indies, an income which they spent in "teaching the religion of peace and goodwill to men."
England continued to be "the great slave trader of the world," until a handful of her sons, humane and determined men, compelled her to gaze into the depths of the Hell the greed of her ruling and trading classes had done so much to create.
The treatment of the transported African varied considerably. There is a concensus of opinion that he fared best under the Portuguese, the Danes, the French and the Spaniards, and worse under the Dutch and the British. The abuses, the immoralities, the tortures practised upon the slaves, and the fierce outbreaks to which they occasionally gave rise, fill hundreds of volumes. They seemed to have reached the height of their intensity in Dutch Guiana and the British West Indies. "For a hundred years slaves in Barbadoes were mutilated, tortured, gibbeted alive and left to starve to death, burnt alive, flung into coppers of boiling sugar, whipped to death."
It would be beyond the scope of this volume to deal with the long struggle waged by Clarkson, Sharp, Wilberforce, and others against the trade, the gradual awakening of the public conscience to its infamies, and the final triumph of the reformers. To Burke, more than to any man, is probably due the changed mental attitude of England towards the rights and the wrongs of coloured peoples, which ultimately enabled the efforts of Wilberforce and his colleagues to attain fruition. In Sir Charles Dilke's incessant labours for the same ends during the closing years of the 19th, and the opening years of the 20th Century, a later generation will perceive more vividly perhaps than does the present one, the persistence of a Parliamentary tradition which he helped to undo something of the evils of official England's African record, and caused her in recent years to give to the colonising Governments of Europe as good an example, on the whole, as the bad one she so long personified. But neither the vigour which Britain showed in the early part of last century in stamping out the slave trade which had conduced so largely to her prosperity in the previous one nor her condemnation of its revival in inverted form on the Congo, nor the comparatively better treatment she has meted out to her coloured subjects during the past half century would qualify her, in view of her terrible past performances, to exercise the functions of judge in relation to the offences of her contemporaries.
Nor are Britain's hands wholly clean to-day. The hands of every European Power which has had dealings with him is stained deep with the blood of the African. For any such Power to approach the African problem on the morrow of the Great War otherwise than with a consciousness of past sins, would be to proclaim itself hypocrite in the eyes of the world. What Britons may legitimately hope for from their rulers is that British policy, devoid of pharisaism, may be directed patiently, strenuously and unselfishly to the task of providing for the long persecuted black man and his descendants a future of hope, promise and assured security.
Citation: Morel, E. D. The Black Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (Manchester: National Labour Press, 1920; BoondocksNet Edition, 2001). http://www.boondocksnet.com/editions/morel
-------------------
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
This material is copy from BoondockNet website [04.02.2005].
Adura Arin-Ajo
The Migrant's Prayer
ADURA B'IRIN LO (THE MIGRANT'S PRAYER)
Dakun, Olorun olugbala, ni ibi gbogbo!
Jeeki mo pada lati dara fun iya ati baba.
Ki mo rin leeroo. Ki wahala mi boosi ore.
Ki mo koo ogbon pupo. Ki mo pawo pupo.
Dakun, emi mi, ni gbogbo ti o nro!
Jeeki mo weeyin wole.
Ki mo jere, ki ere mi yika.
Kaiye ma pami da, ki mo to dele.
Kiile fee iwa afesana.
Dakun jowo, afeesana, tiwa dele!
Pray, mighty God of mine, who is everywhere!
May I return to honour my mother and father.
May I travel safely. May my efforts find favour,
May I learn plenty of knowledge. May my profts be plenty.
Pray, mighty mind of mine, whatever you be!
May I draw succour from my origins.
May I profit, and profit the world around me.
Until I'm home to die, may the world's harms pass by me.
May my people appreciate the curiousities of other cultures.
Pray please, my diaspora relations, welcome my repartriation home!
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
Copyright (c) ALARAN, DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2005
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached
ADURA B'IRIN LO (THE MIGRANT'S PRAYER)
Dakun, Olorun olugbala, ni ibi gbogbo!
Jeeki mo pada lati dara fun iya ati baba.
Ki mo rin leeroo. Ki wahala mi boosi ore.
Ki mo koo ogbon pupo. Ki mo pawo pupo.
Dakun, emi mi, ni gbogbo ti o nro!
Jeeki mo weeyin wole.
Ki mo jere, ki ere mi yika.
Kaiye ma pami da, ki mo to dele.
Kiile fee iwa afesana.
Dakun jowo, afeesana, tiwa dele!
Pray, mighty God of mine, who is everywhere!
May I return to honour my mother and father.
May I travel safely. May my efforts find favour,
May I learn plenty of knowledge. May my profts be plenty.
Pray, mighty mind of mine, whatever you be!
May I draw succour from my origins.
May I profit, and profit the world around me.
Until I'm home to die, may the world's harms pass by me.
May my people appreciate the curiousities of other cultures.
Pray please, my diaspora relations, welcome my repartriation home!
Remi-Niyi Alaran writes on enterprise and social capital.
Copyright (c) ALARAN, DEVELOPMENT ENTERPRISES, 2005
You may copy, transmit, or otherwise use this document provided the copyright notice is attached
Friday, April 18, 2008
African Trading Company
A proposal is made to gather USD50 per month for 24 months per 100,000 Africans living in the USA, and using the funds to start an investment group.
An interesting comment:
I will also suggest that it be structured not as an investment group or bank or other fiduciary institution, but as a trading company along the lines of the Sogo of Japan or Chaebol of Korea or even conglomerates of USA. This organisational strategy can help avoids some trade barriers such as undue or excessive regulation. It requires commitment to world standards in financial and logistics management. The mindset must be gradual domination of processing, marketing and distribution in a core set of technologies and in the associated products. Actual production should be co-ordinated with domestic suppliers and research in collaboration with domestic universities and colleges across Africa.
By sponsoring an apprenticeship system, it can ensue a steady stream of innovative human capital with hands-on knowledge come through the education system. Some will stay with the company. Others will set up on their own and may well become suppliers or marketers for the trading company. If and when it ventures abroad outside the African nation, it should ensure Africans are posted to manage the overseas business unit so that we can learn the intricacies of international trade. Within Africa, at least 10% of net revenues in each business unit should be provisioned for development of local community infrastructure or social services.
There are a number of commodities and associated technologies we can focus on:
1. Foods and beverages, waste management combined with electricity production, internet infrastructure, and education (see above) to secure the home front;
2. Essential minerals such as gold, crude oil, tantalum, iron ore, and so on to secure a sustainable foot-hold in international markets.
As it consolidates its presence in key product lines, governments and multinationals in many African and foreign countries may come to fear it and will then act to undermine it. For this reason, it may be better to focus initially on building/defending the African marketplace. The only sure way of doing this is to make Africans wealthy by encouraging a scheme of equity ownership. If you are concerned that some 'shareholders' will pervert your ideal of local enrichment, then start the trading company as a membership society, with members sharing net revenues in proportion to their trading activity.
This is the business model for my own company. It is early days for us, so I am glad to share it with you. I wish you well, yet, bear in mind: Africa's solutions are problems for the 'international community'.
An interesting comment:
I will also suggest that it be structured not as an investment group or bank or other fiduciary institution, but as a trading company along the lines of the Sogo of Japan or Chaebol of Korea or even conglomerates of USA. This organisational strategy can help avoids some trade barriers such as undue or excessive regulation. It requires commitment to world standards in financial and logistics management. The mindset must be gradual domination of processing, marketing and distribution in a core set of technologies and in the associated products. Actual production should be co-ordinated with domestic suppliers and research in collaboration with domestic universities and colleges across Africa.
By sponsoring an apprenticeship system, it can ensue a steady stream of innovative human capital with hands-on knowledge come through the education system. Some will stay with the company. Others will set up on their own and may well become suppliers or marketers for the trading company. If and when it ventures abroad outside the African nation, it should ensure Africans are posted to manage the overseas business unit so that we can learn the intricacies of international trade. Within Africa, at least 10% of net revenues in each business unit should be provisioned for development of local community infrastructure or social services.
There are a number of commodities and associated technologies we can focus on:
1. Foods and beverages, waste management combined with electricity production, internet infrastructure, and education (see above) to secure the home front;
2. Essential minerals such as gold, crude oil, tantalum, iron ore, and so on to secure a sustainable foot-hold in international markets.
As it consolidates its presence in key product lines, governments and multinationals in many African and foreign countries may come to fear it and will then act to undermine it. For this reason, it may be better to focus initially on building/defending the African marketplace. The only sure way of doing this is to make Africans wealthy by encouraging a scheme of equity ownership. If you are concerned that some 'shareholders' will pervert your ideal of local enrichment, then start the trading company as a membership society, with members sharing net revenues in proportion to their trading activity.
This is the business model for my own company. It is early days for us, so I am glad to share it with you. I wish you well, yet, bear in mind: Africa's solutions are problems for the 'international community'.
Monday, January 21, 2008
When Sheep Call Rabid Dogs To Tend The Flock
He who the gods first make mad...
I am just about to finish reading "tHE SHOCK DOCTRINE" by Naomi Klein. Which highlights that for some 205 or so years from 1893 to now, the USA (and Europe) have expanded their markets by progressively 'shocking' domestic consumers or foreign countries. First by economic shock of destabilising the socio-econimy through free markets that loosens capital controls and democracy that ensures only compliant elites get to rule. If the markets are reluctant, then the shock of war as bombs rain down terror to free the markets. For those who further resist want to keep their land to themselves by all means or just to set an example, there is the body shock of torture and disappeared 'terrorists' .
For years now, we have been raising alarm that Africa is in a war of attrition. All the things that other people do by themselves, our people call on foreigners to come and do for them. Still we have people calling for foreign investment, foreign technical support, foreign aid, foreign tourists, etc. Perhaps they did not notice that all these foreign entities rarely travel without 'escorts' and 'field operatives'. They rarely lend without interest, never give without a trade agreement secured by collateral.
Let me guess why the 'eagle is now landing' while the 'vultures gather around'.
Privatisation and deregulation programmes in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola and South Africa are about to reach a higher level. Now that all the small-small governmert assets have been sold at gbanjo prices, it is the turn of the core assets: NEPA/SONANGOL may be sold to GE, NNPC may be sold to the anglo-american energy companies, and the water, telco and utilities companies may be sold to the other european multinationals. The Broederbond Afrikaners retain 80% control of SA economy and 70% of the land, as they do in Zimbabwe. Our people are fed up with squalor and suffering and dying for nothing. Previous governments have softened us up economically by allowing combination of acute fuel price hikes, inflation, unconstrained capital flight, and total-importation-among-total-unemployment to cripple local productivity. They have set examples of willingness to military violence and police brutality. Meanwhile, nothing is done to prevent people sliding off the dead-end of fundamentalist religions that call on the hopeless to beg from those who damn them the most.
When local people got too tired of the lawlessness and formed vigilante groups, some people called on the same disingenuous governments (whose complicity, incompetence or insincerity caused these crises in the first case) to deal with the 'terrorists' (academics, cultists and tribalists). The turkeys voted for christmas and youth leaders 'disappeared', were dealt with, or somehow died. Now the sheep are calling for the rabid dogs to come and tend the flock. The actors in the former mis-governments are now on the other side and are working with the multinationals and multilateral agencies of countries that open our markets while they close their borders. They want to get paid from privatising the assets that so many people gave up so much to accumulate. They expect peoples' resistance to boil over. So they have asked for (foreign) military support, to reinforce their raping and killing of us. Now, while they move the seats of government onto fortified mini-cities it is the time for you to go prepare your village, and learn the ways of the blacksmith and the bush. t is not accidental that travel into the cities and foreign countries is so problematic. Nigeria, like Iraq, may now finally unite and for all the same reasons.
I am just about to finish reading "tHE SHOCK DOCTRINE" by Naomi Klein. Which highlights that for some 205 or so years from 1893 to now, the USA (and Europe) have expanded their markets by progressively 'shocking' domestic consumers or foreign countries. First by economic shock of destabilising the socio-econimy through free markets that loosens capital controls and democracy that ensures only compliant elites get to rule. If the markets are reluctant, then the shock of war as bombs rain down terror to free the markets. For those who further resist want to keep their land to themselves by all means or just to set an example, there is the body shock of torture and disappeared 'terrorists' .
For years now, we have been raising alarm that Africa is in a war of attrition. All the things that other people do by themselves, our people call on foreigners to come and do for them. Still we have people calling for foreign investment, foreign technical support, foreign aid, foreign tourists, etc. Perhaps they did not notice that all these foreign entities rarely travel without 'escorts' and 'field operatives'. They rarely lend without interest, never give without a trade agreement secured by collateral.
Let me guess why the 'eagle is now landing' while the 'vultures gather around'.
Privatisation and deregulation programmes in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola and South Africa are about to reach a higher level. Now that all the small-small governmert assets have been sold at gbanjo prices, it is the turn of the core assets: NEPA/SONANGOL may be sold to GE, NNPC may be sold to the anglo-american energy companies, and the water, telco and utilities companies may be sold to the other european multinationals. The Broederbond Afrikaners retain 80% control of SA economy and 70% of the land, as they do in Zimbabwe. Our people are fed up with squalor and suffering and dying for nothing. Previous governments have softened us up economically by allowing combination of acute fuel price hikes, inflation, unconstrained capital flight, and total-importation-among-total-unemployment to cripple local productivity. They have set examples of willingness to military violence and police brutality. Meanwhile, nothing is done to prevent people sliding off the dead-end of fundamentalist religions that call on the hopeless to beg from those who damn them the most.
When local people got too tired of the lawlessness and formed vigilante groups, some people called on the same disingenuous governments (whose complicity, incompetence or insincerity caused these crises in the first case) to deal with the 'terrorists' (academics, cultists and tribalists). The turkeys voted for christmas and youth leaders 'disappeared', were dealt with, or somehow died. Now the sheep are calling for the rabid dogs to come and tend the flock. The actors in the former mis-governments are now on the other side and are working with the multinationals and multilateral agencies of countries that open our markets while they close their borders. They want to get paid from privatising the assets that so many people gave up so much to accumulate. They expect peoples' resistance to boil over. So they have asked for (foreign) military support, to reinforce their raping and killing of us. Now, while they move the seats of government onto fortified mini-cities it is the time for you to go prepare your village, and learn the ways of the blacksmith and the bush. t is not accidental that travel into the cities and foreign countries is so problematic. Nigeria, like Iraq, may now finally unite and for all the same reasons.
Friday, October 12, 2007
Marketeers or Governments: who should control the economy?
Commanding Heights video 1 video 2 video 3
Supposedly the 'new world order' is the re-eminence of market forces over control of the economy. Globalisation of capitalism, privatisation, weakened representative government and opened markets. Who pays the gold, controls the rulers. But now, the logical consequence of un-restrained capitalism is evident across the globe. The owners of global capital and violence become a separate society dominant over local owners of labour and materials.
Globalisation is a system of world economic restructuring. It is not the end in itself of the globalising forces. So who are the driving forces, and what do they want from the localised? These videos highlight the old Hegelian dialectic of right / free marketeers and left / big government. Commanding Heights does not show who really holds the commanding heights of our societies and economies. Globalisation is not here to stay, unless it shares its risks and rewards more equitably.
Interesting pattern, Food disappears from markets. Chaos. The globalists, the church-jesuits and the media appear in the right place. Governments kill industry and hand the people over. Food appears. Order.
For example, Bolivia, an agrarian economy like much of the world, finds it difficult to feed its own people. Global marketeer Jeffry Sachs is asked for economic development plan, travels to Bolivia, AND just happens to run into the soon-to-be-president. Hmmm.
Bolivian 'Shock Therapy' becomes the standard medicine offered by world bank / IMF to the 'developing world'. But only if they agree not to compete in advanced markets and stay in primary production.
At the national level, the central banks are the agencies of free markets.
Supposedly the 'new world order' is the re-eminence of market forces over control of the economy. Globalisation of capitalism, privatisation, weakened representative government and opened markets. Who pays the gold, controls the rulers. But now, the logical consequence of un-restrained capitalism is evident across the globe. The owners of global capital and violence become a separate society dominant over local owners of labour and materials.
Globalisation is a system of world economic restructuring. It is not the end in itself of the globalising forces. So who are the driving forces, and what do they want from the localised? These videos highlight the old Hegelian dialectic of right / free marketeers and left / big government. Commanding Heights does not show who really holds the commanding heights of our societies and economies. Globalisation is not here to stay, unless it shares its risks and rewards more equitably.
Interesting pattern, Food disappears from markets. Chaos. The globalists, the church-jesuits and the media appear in the right place. Governments kill industry and hand the people over. Food appears. Order.
For example, Bolivia, an agrarian economy like much of the world, finds it difficult to feed its own people. Global marketeer Jeffry Sachs is asked for economic development plan, travels to Bolivia, AND just happens to run into the soon-to-be-president. Hmmm.
Bolivian 'Shock Therapy' becomes the standard medicine offered by world bank / IMF to the 'developing world'. But only if they agree not to compete in advanced markets and stay in primary production.
At the national level, the central banks are the agencies of free markets.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Euroslaves - seignorage
Euroslaves - The seigniorage's fraud and the secrets of public debt
Making Money
Who benefits from the global system of central banks controlling money supply. Seignorage is the difference between the cost of making (printing and circulating) money and the market price of money. Central banks earn seignorage from the primary supply of money and from secondary supply to replace worn-out or withdrawn money. The cost is about 0.03 on every 100.00. Private banks own and control the central banks. Private banks are owned by private shareholders. Private banks earn seignorage through the fractional lending system. At a 2% fractional reserves requirement level set by central banks, the high street bank actually keeps 2.00 in the vault and lends 98.00 (usually to another bank) of every 100 that you deposit. When you borrow, your 'loan' liability is also a ' virtual deposit' asset of the bank. It can then issue a real 98% loan, with interest, on this virtual deposit.
Making Money
Who benefits from the global system of central banks controlling money supply. Seignorage is the difference between the cost of making (printing and circulating) money and the market price of money. Central banks earn seignorage from the primary supply of money and from secondary supply to replace worn-out or withdrawn money. The cost is about 0.03 on every 100.00. Private banks own and control the central banks. Private banks are owned by private shareholders. Private banks earn seignorage through the fractional lending system. At a 2% fractional reserves requirement level set by central banks, the high street bank actually keeps 2.00 in the vault and lends 98.00 (usually to another bank) of every 100 that you deposit. When you borrow, your 'loan' liability is also a ' virtual deposit' asset of the bank. It can then issue a real 98% loan, with interest, on this virtual deposit.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
When is a Zulu Not a Zulu?
There is a storm brewing.
video: What Can DNA Tell Us About Race,
One of the leading authorities on race and science, Troy Duster discusses how the understanding of race is being reshaped by the genomics revolution. Sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not so innocently, genomics may be generating a new and more sophisticated racism, not so different from the eugenics-based and criminological racism that flourished in decades gone by.
Troy Duster bursts the balloon underpinning the Ancestry By DNA business.
DNA Print Genomics, a very well funded private research institute "helps police" to use DNA to catch a suspect implicated in a murder case. The case had been unsolved for years. The research institute happened to have a side business that claims it trace DNA back ten generations (about 300 years). The purpose? to help those who want to know where they are from, originally. This kind of search is particularly poignant for the African diaspora who endured separation and disconnect during the Middle Passage. The European slave trade was good business from the 1400s to about 1850 and it appears to be a perennial money spinner. There are plenty of customers. Ancestry.com report USD140 million revenues for FY2005 mostly by annual subscriptions.
Turns out that HUGO lets your ancestry be traced on both sides of parentage. You could always trace your REAL father via the Y chromosomes. Now, with genetic engineering, you can trace your real mother through mitochondrial DNA [mDNA]. Ability to trace ancestry via mother is especially important in societies where women have been raped, yet denied, for generations. Many African-Americans have some yurugu blood originating from this crime. They are not trying to disprove yurugu genes. The desire is to connect with the African heritage. Or to establish how many drops of blood... not.
Step up, Oprah Winfrey, who just knows and feels that she is Zulu. Now she has enough money to set up a research facility in Africa to enable the heritage to gain technological capabilities in genomics and biotechnology. And "Skip" Gates who may not have as much wealth, but keeps the wolf off the door by sending other (black) sheep out. And TD Jakes who fleeces them and plucks out their eyes on the way out, amen. Skip wants to know if DNAprints can help. Surprise, surprise, they "confirm" that Oprah is not Zulu after all. Seems that Oprah or Skip could not gather the strength to ask if Oprah is of the Yoruba or Ibo or any other Bantu nation. Seems they could tell all Africans had disowned Gates and Jakes.
How can you say someone is not a Zulu when you cannot sample the DNA of Zulus in the 1500s? Indeed, the only job of the Human Genome Project (HUGO) is to enable eugenicists to make racist supremacy statements while withholding the technology that allows their claims to be independently proven. It is a genocidal weapon, not a solution.
video: What Can DNA Tell Us About Race,
One of the leading authorities on race and science, Troy Duster discusses how the understanding of race is being reshaped by the genomics revolution. Sometimes unintentionally and sometimes not so innocently, genomics may be generating a new and more sophisticated racism, not so different from the eugenics-based and criminological racism that flourished in decades gone by.
Troy Duster bursts the balloon underpinning the Ancestry By DNA business.
DNA Print Genomics, a very well funded private research institute "helps police" to use DNA to catch a suspect implicated in a murder case. The case had been unsolved for years. The research institute happened to have a side business that claims it trace DNA back ten generations (about 300 years). The purpose? to help those who want to know where they are from, originally. This kind of search is particularly poignant for the African diaspora who endured separation and disconnect during the Middle Passage. The European slave trade was good business from the 1400s to about 1850 and it appears to be a perennial money spinner. There are plenty of customers. Ancestry.com report USD140 million revenues for FY2005 mostly by annual subscriptions.
Turns out that HUGO lets your ancestry be traced on both sides of parentage. You could always trace your REAL father via the Y chromosomes. Now, with genetic engineering, you can trace your real mother through mitochondrial DNA [mDNA]. Ability to trace ancestry via mother is especially important in societies where women have been raped, yet denied, for generations. Many African-Americans have some yurugu blood originating from this crime. They are not trying to disprove yurugu genes. The desire is to connect with the African heritage. Or to establish how many drops of blood... not.
Step up, Oprah Winfrey, who just knows and feels that she is Zulu. Now she has enough money to set up a research facility in Africa to enable the heritage to gain technological capabilities in genomics and biotechnology. And "Skip" Gates who may not have as much wealth, but keeps the wolf off the door by sending other (black) sheep out. And TD Jakes who fleeces them and plucks out their eyes on the way out, amen. Skip wants to know if DNAprints can help. Surprise, surprise, they "confirm" that Oprah is not Zulu after all. Seems that Oprah or Skip could not gather the strength to ask if Oprah is of the Yoruba or Ibo or any other Bantu nation. Seems they could tell all Africans had disowned Gates and Jakes.
How can you say someone is not a Zulu when you cannot sample the DNA of Zulus in the 1500s? Indeed, the only job of the Human Genome Project (HUGO) is to enable eugenicists to make racist supremacy statements while withholding the technology that allows their claims to be independently proven. It is a genocidal weapon, not a solution.
Monday, September 17, 2007
The new Eugenics
Eugenics originated in England, UK. It came to fruition as government policy in USA. It came to prominence in Germany. After disrepute under the Nazi party, eugenics became genetics and precipitated the Human Genome Project. Now it is called bio-technology. Eugenics is the foundation of the new science of Trans-genics whereby new life-forms are created by combining the genetic material of different organisms. Goats that produce milk in form of spider silk. Pigs that produce organs that beat human natural antigen defense mechanisms. Mice that have human ears growing out of their backs. A key area of intensive research is trans-humanism. Trans-humans are human beings borne of artificially combined genes. Selected human genes pre-screened to include traits deemed desirable or to exclude traits deemed undesirable. Who decides what traits will be deemed desirable or non-desirable?
Under USA chattel slavery, elite plantation owners used nearly-wageless slave labour to build wealth and power. As slave labour was nearly free, the elites had little or no use for poor "freemen" labourers. Elites tried to convince themselves and others, including slaves, that slaves were mindless sub-humans capable only of work, sex, fighting and feeding. Freemen and rebellious slaves united in many uprisings to overcome the exploitation they endured. Elites created the social concept of racism in order to divide the union among poor workers. They persecuted and drove freemen away from settled lands in order to deny them collaboration with conquered slaves. Slave-capitalism was more cost-effective than industrial-capitalism that was only beginning to establish in north-east USA. As the European settlements went west with expansion of the frontier, so did slave-capitalism threaten to undermine both free labour and industrial capital. The USA civil war was fought to stop the westward expansion of slave-capitalism, and not to free the slaves.
Elite investors in trans-humans can now see a new world order, in which trans-humans bred to be either mindless and sexless work-slaves or super-powerful mindless soldier-slaves that serve super-humans. In the transition period before these "gathacans" are become sufficient, eugenic elites are working to dumb down and de-populate the rest of humanity.
Food: control of food systems through destruction of natural pollinators (birds and bees), member-only exchange trading systems for marketing and pricing of food and commodity products, biotechnology (capital intensive seed and animal reproduction, farming, processing and preservation), consolidation of supermarkets and retail food outlets, designation of arable land as wildlife conservation areas or natural parks even as human activity enforces genocide of non-cultivated species, etc
De-population: engineered climate change, un-winnable and genocidal wars that recruit disproportionately from the 'underclass', manufactured and untreated historical diseases such as AIDS, malaria, lack of planning for natural disasters, monopoly of natural resources, depletion of groundwater that causes droughts, proliferation of 'planned parenthood' and similar abortion factories, mis-education that induces self-hatred, ethnic or racial cleansing, and gang-warfare, etc
video Trans-humanism debate
How to tackle this eugenic agenda?
Under USA chattel slavery, elite plantation owners used nearly-wageless slave labour to build wealth and power. As slave labour was nearly free, the elites had little or no use for poor "freemen" labourers. Elites tried to convince themselves and others, including slaves, that slaves were mindless sub-humans capable only of work, sex, fighting and feeding. Freemen and rebellious slaves united in many uprisings to overcome the exploitation they endured. Elites created the social concept of racism in order to divide the union among poor workers. They persecuted and drove freemen away from settled lands in order to deny them collaboration with conquered slaves. Slave-capitalism was more cost-effective than industrial-capitalism that was only beginning to establish in north-east USA. As the European settlements went west with expansion of the frontier, so did slave-capitalism threaten to undermine both free labour and industrial capital. The USA civil war was fought to stop the westward expansion of slave-capitalism, and not to free the slaves.
Elite investors in trans-humans can now see a new world order, in which trans-humans bred to be either mindless and sexless work-slaves or super-powerful mindless soldier-slaves that serve super-humans. In the transition period before these "gathacans" are become sufficient, eugenic elites are working to dumb down and de-populate the rest of humanity.
Food: control of food systems through destruction of natural pollinators (birds and bees), member-only exchange trading systems for marketing and pricing of food and commodity products, biotechnology (capital intensive seed and animal reproduction, farming, processing and preservation), consolidation of supermarkets and retail food outlets, designation of arable land as wildlife conservation areas or natural parks even as human activity enforces genocide of non-cultivated species, etc
De-population: engineered climate change, un-winnable and genocidal wars that recruit disproportionately from the 'underclass', manufactured and untreated historical diseases such as AIDS, malaria, lack of planning for natural disasters, monopoly of natural resources, depletion of groundwater that causes droughts, proliferation of 'planned parenthood' and similar abortion factories, mis-education that induces self-hatred, ethnic or racial cleansing, and gang-warfare, etc
video Trans-humanism debate
How to tackle this eugenic agenda?
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Protecting our people
Greetings, Again, I will let the observations and facts of others speak for themselves. However, I will start with some comments of my own.
There is a global war on people of African heritage. One of the battles in this war is the battle to be born. Thereafter come the battles to nourish well, learn wisdoms (education), contribute to wellness of African society, and attain spiritual fulfillment.
The continent of Africa is under-populated. Apart from a few cosmopolitan city-states, notably Lagos, Tshwane (Jo'burg) and Ibadan, the evidence of under-population stares us in the face whenever one travels from any one of our major cities to another. In other parts of the world, the under-populated strength of African-heritage people is a strong factor in their oppression by other communities. There are those who want this land for their own people.
We need to have more children IN ORDER to strengthen our society. We need to bring them up to look to us - their parents and elders - for their nurture, their aspirations, and their protection. We also need to make up for the centuries over which our people were selectively 'harvested' from the African continent to make up for skills shortages in Arabia, Europe and the Americas.
Let us help young people to start families while still in their 20s or 30s. There is business in helping African youth with family building and financial planning and business creation. We need to educate ourselves about the role of birth control clinics in trafficking aborted fetuses to producers of anti-aging creams and eugenicist-researchers in human genetics.
Africans in particular, and poor people all over the world, are today targeted for depopulation. Our growing NGO industry find few 'projects' attract as much benevolent grant funding and technical assistance from our international "well-wishers" as [B]population control[/B]. Did you ever consider that the NGO crowd and their anti-government bias and population control focus may be part of the same agenda?:
Full text of NSSM 200
An assessment of The NSSM 200
Note that this is OFFICIAL government policy of the United States of America USA. It was edited by Henry Kissinger, a member of the CFR. Recently, the USA state department (ministry of defense) issued a statement to the effect that Nigeria may break up by 2016. That was a statement of intent. It was not a warning. It was notification of efforts to break up Nigeria. Why? For the same reasons as Africa was partitioned, India was partitioned, and now Iraq, Sudan and Cameroon will soon be partitioned. First the foreign direct investment in Akotileta governments and NGOs whose policies and actions are specifically geared to weakening our economy and entrenching [U]chaos[/U] in our society. If that proves insufficient, there will be further chaos of sectarian (read: tribal or religious) warfare. Then will come foreign help (invasion and peace-keeping) and finally, the [U]order[/U] of partition. Again, why? Divide and conquer. By who? The elite supremacists who seek "ordo ab chao".
I have placed this material here for educational purposes. Download It. Print It. Decide for yourself and share your knowledge.
There is a global war on people of African heritage. One of the battles in this war is the battle to be born. Thereafter come the battles to nourish well, learn wisdoms (education), contribute to wellness of African society, and attain spiritual fulfillment.
The continent of Africa is under-populated. Apart from a few cosmopolitan city-states, notably Lagos, Tshwane (Jo'burg) and Ibadan, the evidence of under-population stares us in the face whenever one travels from any one of our major cities to another. In other parts of the world, the under-populated strength of African-heritage people is a strong factor in their oppression by other communities. There are those who want this land for their own people.
We need to have more children IN ORDER to strengthen our society. We need to bring them up to look to us - their parents and elders - for their nurture, their aspirations, and their protection. We also need to make up for the centuries over which our people were selectively 'harvested' from the African continent to make up for skills shortages in Arabia, Europe and the Americas.
Let us help young people to start families while still in their 20s or 30s. There is business in helping African youth with family building and financial planning and business creation. We need to educate ourselves about the role of birth control clinics in trafficking aborted fetuses to producers of anti-aging creams and eugenicist-researchers in human genetics.
Africans in particular, and poor people all over the world, are today targeted for depopulation. Our growing NGO industry find few 'projects' attract as much benevolent grant funding and technical assistance from our international "well-wishers" as [B]population control[/B]. Did you ever consider that the NGO crowd and their anti-government bias and population control focus may be part of the same agenda?:
Full text of NSSM 200
An assessment of The NSSM 200
Note that this is OFFICIAL government policy of the United States of America USA. It was edited by Henry Kissinger, a member of the CFR. Recently, the USA state department (ministry of defense) issued a statement to the effect that Nigeria may break up by 2016. That was a statement of intent. It was not a warning. It was notification of efforts to break up Nigeria. Why? For the same reasons as Africa was partitioned, India was partitioned, and now Iraq, Sudan and Cameroon will soon be partitioned. First the foreign direct investment in Akotileta governments and NGOs whose policies and actions are specifically geared to weakening our economy and entrenching [U]chaos[/U] in our society. If that proves insufficient, there will be further chaos of sectarian (read: tribal or religious) warfare. Then will come foreign help (invasion and peace-keeping) and finally, the [U]order[/U] of partition. Again, why? Divide and conquer. By who? The elite supremacists who seek "ordo ab chao".
I have placed this material here for educational purposes. Download It. Print It. Decide for yourself and share your knowledge.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Hebrew or the so-called Negro
The enemies of the Hebrews have slaughtered people of Afrikan heritage in the hundreds of millions.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Afrikans in Science
Ivan Van Settima, the author of They Came Before Columbus explores his book Blacks in Science - Ancient and Modern
Christopher Columbus NEVER ONCE set foot on the American continent.
We know little about Africa because of (historians' and anthropologists') fascination with the primitive, and their habit of extrapolating, from these limited observations, books about Africa that tell us little of the quintessential African.
Africa has far less jungle than any other continent comparable with its land space.
A great many Africans are Eurocentric in thought and deed. They do not know where they are coming from, what is going on, or where they are going.
The Europeans Avery(?) and Schmidt(?) in 1978 discovered that 1500 - 2000 years ago, Africans were smelting steel in Tanzania, in a machine using a semi-conductor unknown in Europe until the 20th century. At 1800 degree Centigrade. Producing iron crystallisation process to process a fine blue of carbon steel. In a single stage which was more efficient that Europe's later 2 stage process.
Imaging the holocaust of taking some one hundred million people out of a society over three hundred years. The massive destruction of civilisations so that people can mock Africa and say "why are you so inferior and fragmented now if you used to have such fine civilisations?"
Knowledge about "black" people has become highly politicised.
Then a discovery just a few months after the Tanzanian smelter, by American researchers Lynch(?) and Robbins(?), of an astronomical observatory, a kind of African Stonehedge, in Namaratung(?) in north-west Kenya. They were able to note that that Kenyans had developed an accurate pre- (European) historic calendar in at least 300 BCE. The calender we use today is derived from the Ancient Egyptian. It was invented in 4200 BCE. Babylonians did not have a proper calendar. The astronomical observations of Egyptians helped divided the year into 12 months of 30 days each. They put 5 festival days at the end of the year.
Cheikh Anta Diop discovered a civilisation, a monastic dynasty (Tar-Seti?) in the Nile valley dated at least 2000 years before the first dynasty of ancient Egyptian. At Tar-Seti, they founded not only architectural forms, but also the falcon god Horus, the crown art-form associated with Egypt, the palace facade later used by the Egyptians, and above all, they found heiroglyphs. So the first writing in the world is not even Egyptian, rather it is Ethiopian / Sudanic.
In west Africa, around 13th century AD, about 7 centuries ago, Africans (the Dogon tribe now in Mali) were recording the star system, Sirius B, which is invisible to the naked eye. Sirius A is a bright star that all can see. The Africans also projected its orbit and projectory up to 1990 AD at the end of the 20th century AND intuited its mass. Europe's reaction: a MIT professor is said to have commented "Africans have no business knowing this kind of thing".
The first scientific evidence of the use of numbers in the world is found in the Congo, Zaire. It is known as Ishango-bone(?) and is 8000 years old. It is a simple mathematics but it is the first evidence avalable. The Yoruba mathematical system is one of the most complex and abstract in the world.
Nobody goes to the semi-primitive communities of Eastern Europe and writes of its inhabitants as indicative of all Europeans, yet that is done with Africa.
The first medical journals, the first mathematical papyrus were WRITTEN in African languages.
A lot of the Greek, ancient and modern European, scholars went to Africa to pick up knowledge and returned to Europe to be proclaimed the father of this, the father of that...
Where is the English script? Cicero said "the English are so stupid, I am not sure we can make successful slaves of them!" There were many scripts in Africa even if only a few (the literate) used them.
By the 13th AD century, Africans were already performing eye cataract surgery, ceasarean?! section surgery, used drugs for hypertension and some phycho-somatic disorders, had perfectly ground spherical lenses, made telescopes...
In modern science, more than 100 patents by African-Americans up to 1913, despite that many inventions under slavery were attributed to plantation owners or to lawyers, as slaves were not considered citizens of the USA. A patent is a contract between the government and a citizen.
I spent 4 years at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), London University doing my first degree, and never once, never once in all those years did I learn did I learn anything about any African civilisation.
Christopher Columbus NEVER ONCE set foot on the American continent.
We know little about Africa because of (historians' and anthropologists') fascination with the primitive, and their habit of extrapolating, from these limited observations, books about Africa that tell us little of the quintessential African.
Africa has far less jungle than any other continent comparable with its land space.
A great many Africans are Eurocentric in thought and deed. They do not know where they are coming from, what is going on, or where they are going.
The Europeans Avery(?) and Schmidt(?) in 1978 discovered that 1500 - 2000 years ago, Africans were smelting steel in Tanzania, in a machine using a semi-conductor unknown in Europe until the 20th century. At 1800 degree Centigrade. Producing iron crystallisation process to process a fine blue of carbon steel. In a single stage which was more efficient that Europe's later 2 stage process.
Imaging the holocaust of taking some one hundred million people out of a society over three hundred years. The massive destruction of civilisations so that people can mock Africa and say "why are you so inferior and fragmented now if you used to have such fine civilisations?"
Knowledge about "black" people has become highly politicised.
Then a discovery just a few months after the Tanzanian smelter, by American researchers Lynch(?) and Robbins(?), of an astronomical observatory, a kind of African Stonehedge, in Namaratung(?) in north-west Kenya. They were able to note that that Kenyans had developed an accurate pre- (European) historic calendar in at least 300 BCE. The calender we use today is derived from the Ancient Egyptian. It was invented in 4200 BCE. Babylonians did not have a proper calendar. The astronomical observations of Egyptians helped divided the year into 12 months of 30 days each. They put 5 festival days at the end of the year.
Cheikh Anta Diop discovered a civilisation, a monastic dynasty (Tar-Seti?) in the Nile valley dated at least 2000 years before the first dynasty of ancient Egyptian. At Tar-Seti, they founded not only architectural forms, but also the falcon god Horus, the crown art-form associated with Egypt, the palace facade later used by the Egyptians, and above all, they found heiroglyphs. So the first writing in the world is not even Egyptian, rather it is Ethiopian / Sudanic.
In west Africa, around 13th century AD, about 7 centuries ago, Africans (the Dogon tribe now in Mali) were recording the star system, Sirius B, which is invisible to the naked eye. Sirius A is a bright star that all can see. The Africans also projected its orbit and projectory up to 1990 AD at the end of the 20th century AND intuited its mass. Europe's reaction: a MIT professor is said to have commented "Africans have no business knowing this kind of thing".
The first scientific evidence of the use of numbers in the world is found in the Congo, Zaire. It is known as Ishango-bone(?) and is 8000 years old. It is a simple mathematics but it is the first evidence avalable. The Yoruba mathematical system is one of the most complex and abstract in the world.
Nobody goes to the semi-primitive communities of Eastern Europe and writes of its inhabitants as indicative of all Europeans, yet that is done with Africa.
The first medical journals, the first mathematical papyrus were WRITTEN in African languages.
A lot of the Greek, ancient and modern European, scholars went to Africa to pick up knowledge and returned to Europe to be proclaimed the father of this, the father of that...
Where is the English script? Cicero said "the English are so stupid, I am not sure we can make successful slaves of them!" There were many scripts in Africa even if only a few (the literate) used them.
By the 13th AD century, Africans were already performing eye cataract surgery, ceasarean?! section surgery, used drugs for hypertension and some phycho-somatic disorders, had perfectly ground spherical lenses, made telescopes...
In modern science, more than 100 patents by African-Americans up to 1913, despite that many inventions under slavery were attributed to plantation owners or to lawyers, as slaves were not considered citizens of the USA. A patent is a contract between the government and a citizen.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Read A Book 2: Unschooling
The Ijebu Drums take the view that adults should help the young develop organised intellect, independent thought, and active productivity. The education system is proving to deliver the opposite of these virtues. The Home-Schooling movement recognises this deficiency in schooling. Whether it is funded or managed by private, public and faith authorities, schools appear to be training the young to be only obedient, mono-dimensional, hyper-consumers.
This responsible adult on The Power of Home Schooling and Power of HomeSchooling Book Review Part 2 has recommended some books and activities for adults.
Here is a partial listing of the books mentioned.
The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use The World As Your Child's Classroom by Mary Griffith
addresses the issues and diffi culties of unschooling in this practical guide. The book hel ps parents to raise self-reliant, self-motivated learners an d helps children to fulfil their true potential.
Raising Children Who Think For Themselves by Elisa Medhus
is a prescriptive parenting book with many qualities that give it a broad appeal. It reveals the one force tipping the scales of society towards the dead-end and perilous road of moral decay: We are taught to govern ourselves through external influences rather than through our inner voice of reason. In other words, we are externally directed instead of internally directed, and sadly we raise our children to be the same. Fortunately, it is never too late to address this problem: a child of any age will benefit when they learn how to follow their own inspiration and rely on their intuition.
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn
argues that school is the antithesis of democracy, that children and teenagers are being deprived of their freedom and trained for life in totalitariasm and they are learning less than they would out of school. It makes the obvious point that schools destroy people's love of learning replacing it with a system based on fear of failure. It then offers advice on how to quit school including persauding your parents. The next section explains how to use different resources available in the community in order to learn and the final section explains the possibilities open to unschoolers to earn money . Every teenager should read this book, but so should every teacher, parent and politician.
Mathematical Games
Total Recall: How To Boost Your Memory Power by Joan Minninger
The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen
War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign To Create A Master Race by Edwin Black
[BTW. It seems that the deliberate dumbing down of schooling, health, nutrition and other life choices across the world is part of an eugenic campaign. Today the program for condom use hardly questions the sterilisation effects of spermicidal chemicals used in condoms or of the trace elements and condom material left behind in the female organs. Already, the spate of forced abortions in some communities is likened to an eugenic genocide. Maybe this book casts some further light]
They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Settima
People from the African continent arrived in the Americas well before the person known as Christoper Columbus is recorded to have discovered it (hence, the New World) for Europeans. As in Australia, New Zealand, parts of Africa, and the Americas itself, European settlers killed off many of the natives.
Guess What Came to Dinner?: Parasites and Your Health by Ann Louise Gittleman
Toxics A to Z A Guide to Everyday Pollution Hazards by John Harte, Cheryl Holdren, Richard Schneider, and Christine Shirley
The Secret Life of Plants by Chr Tompkins Peter
The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Homeschooling for Excellence by David Colfax
The Colfax teenagers run their own businesses, write articles for their local journals, help with building work and care for goats on their homestead all whilst reading prolifically, and gaining a science education which would be the envy of most univesity professors. The oldest three go to Harvard, but one could almost say that this is by the way.
The Anatomy Coloring Book by Wynn Kapit and Lawrence M. Elson
Alternative Answers To Pain: The Complete Conventional and Alternative Guide to Treating Chronic Pain (Reader's Digest Alternative Answers by Richard Thomas
Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? by Neil Z. Miller
The Sinus Sourcebook by Deborah F. Rosin
Milk: The Deadly Poison by Robert Cohen of notmilk.com
milk is a toxic substance, containing hundreds of different substances, each one having the potential to exert a powerful biological effect when taken independently of the others. Milk contains proteins and hormones, fat and cholesterol, pesticides, viruses and bacteria (including bovine leukaemia, bovine tuberculosis and cow immunodeficiency virus), all combining to produce an array of ailments in humans. It investigates possible conspiracies which may have influenced the FDA and Congress as well as the scientific and medical establishment to deliberately disguise the dangers of consuming milk and dairy products.
The Praetorian Guard: United States Role in the New World Order by John Stockwell
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (Hardcover) by Maccoby Hyam
Raw Power!: Building Strength and Muscle Naturally by Stephen Arlin
The Healing Miracles Of Coconut Oil by Bruce N.D. Fife
Drugs Masquerading As Foods: Deliciously Killing American-Afrikans and All Peoples by Suzar
I turned to this book after more than 2 years of constant pain and illness that none of my doctors could diagnose or cure. Desperate for help, I bought this book and tried most of the author's recommendations. I stopped eating white flour, grains, sugar, dairy, and certain types of fat.
Water: The Shocking Truth That Can Save Your Life by Patricia Bragg and Paul C. Bragg
Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-altering Substances by K.Ronald Siegel
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann
Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness by Jim Keith
Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Animal Wise: The Spirit Language and Signs of Nature by Ted Andrews
To add some personal choices
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism by Stephan Kuhl
The Nazi movement rested on an occult mythology shared among many in the European elite. As such, its beliefs and rites, including royal hierarchy and racialist supremacy, are also widely shared and may be the basis of many European 'values', economic activities, and social policies - certainly in Germany, UK and USA. Many of the Nazi scientists were helped to leave Germany at the end of the European World War Two to settle in UK, USA and South Africa and to continue their work. This work continues in the Human Genome Project and in the man-ufactured diseases Ebola, Mad Cow Disease, and AIDS.
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America by Kevin Kruse
a myth-shattering book. Focusing on the city that prided itself as 'too busy to hate,' Kevin Kruse reveals the everyday ways that middle-class whites in Atlanta resisted civil rights, withdrew from the public sphere, and in the process fashioned a new, grassroots, suburban-based conservatism [that powered the new Republican and Democratic parties]. This important book has national implications for our thinking about the links between race, suburbanization, and the rise of the New Right.
Race to the Frontier: "White Flight" and Western Expansion by John Dippel
Why did so many thousands of settlers pull up stakes and undertake the arduous journey to the frontier in 18th- and 19th-century America. While the desire for a more prosperous future figured prominently in their decisions, so did another, largely overlooked factor - the presence of slavery and the growing number of blacks, both free and slave, in the eastern half of the United States. Poor white farmers, particularly those in the Upper South, found themselves displaced by the spreading of the plantation system. In order to survive economically they were chronically forced to move further inland. As they did so... they sought to erect legal barriers to prevent slavery from taking hold as well as to deter the migration of free blacks who would otherwise compete for jobs and endanger white society.
Yakub & The Origins Of White Supremacy: Message To The White Man & Woman In America by Dorothy Blake
Blacked Out Through Whitewash: Exposing the Quantum Deception/Rediscovering and Recovering Suppressed Melanated by Suzar
Websites
The Mankind Quarterly
The Occidental Quarterly
This responsible adult on The Power of Home Schooling and Power of HomeSchooling Book Review Part 2 has recommended some books and activities for adults.
Here is a partial listing of the books mentioned.
The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use The World As Your Child's Classroom by Mary Griffith
addresses the issues and diffi culties of unschooling in this practical guide. The book hel ps parents to raise self-reliant, self-motivated learners an d helps children to fulfil their true potential.
Raising Children Who Think For Themselves by Elisa Medhus
is a prescriptive parenting book with many qualities that give it a broad appeal. It reveals the one force tipping the scales of society towards the dead-end and perilous road of moral decay: We are taught to govern ourselves through external influences rather than through our inner voice of reason. In other words, we are externally directed instead of internally directed, and sadly we raise our children to be the same. Fortunately, it is never too late to address this problem: a child of any age will benefit when they learn how to follow their own inspiration and rely on their intuition.
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn
argues that school is the antithesis of democracy, that children and teenagers are being deprived of their freedom and trained for life in totalitariasm and they are learning less than they would out of school. It makes the obvious point that schools destroy people's love of learning replacing it with a system based on fear of failure. It then offers advice on how to quit school including persauding your parents. The next section explains how to use different resources available in the community in order to learn and the final section explains the possibilities open to unschoolers to earn money . Every teenager should read this book, but so should every teacher, parent and politician.
Mathematical Games
Total Recall: How To Boost Your Memory Power by Joan Minninger
The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen
War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign To Create A Master Race by Edwin Black
[BTW. It seems that the deliberate dumbing down of schooling, health, nutrition and other life choices across the world is part of an eugenic campaign. Today the program for condom use hardly questions the sterilisation effects of spermicidal chemicals used in condoms or of the trace elements and condom material left behind in the female organs. Already, the spate of forced abortions in some communities is likened to an eugenic genocide. Maybe this book casts some further light]
They Came Before Columbus by Ivan Settima
People from the African continent arrived in the Americas well before the person known as Christoper Columbus is recorded to have discovered it (hence, the New World) for Europeans. As in Australia, New Zealand, parts of Africa, and the Americas itself, European settlers killed off many of the natives.
Guess What Came to Dinner?: Parasites and Your Health by Ann Louise Gittleman
Toxics A to Z A Guide to Everyday Pollution Hazards by John Harte, Cheryl Holdren, Richard Schneider, and Christine Shirley
The Secret Life of Plants by Chr Tompkins Peter
The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in Direct Perception of Nature by Stephen Harrod Buhner
Homeschooling for Excellence by David Colfax
The Colfax teenagers run their own businesses, write articles for their local journals, help with building work and care for goats on their homestead all whilst reading prolifically, and gaining a science education which would be the envy of most univesity professors. The oldest three go to Harvard, but one could almost say that this is by the way.
The Anatomy Coloring Book by Wynn Kapit and Lawrence M. Elson
Alternative Answers To Pain: The Complete Conventional and Alternative Guide to Treating Chronic Pain (Reader's Digest Alternative Answers by Richard Thomas
Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective? by Neil Z. Miller
The Sinus Sourcebook by Deborah F. Rosin
Milk: The Deadly Poison by Robert Cohen of notmilk.com
milk is a toxic substance, containing hundreds of different substances, each one having the potential to exert a powerful biological effect when taken independently of the others. Milk contains proteins and hormones, fat and cholesterol, pesticides, viruses and bacteria (including bovine leukaemia, bovine tuberculosis and cow immunodeficiency virus), all combining to produce an array of ailments in humans. It investigates possible conspiracies which may have influenced the FDA and Congress as well as the scientific and medical establishment to deliberately disguise the dangers of consuming milk and dairy products.
The Praetorian Guard: United States Role in the New World Order by John Stockwell
The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (Hardcover) by Maccoby Hyam
Raw Power!: Building Strength and Muscle Naturally by Stephen Arlin
The Healing Miracles Of Coconut Oil by Bruce N.D. Fife
Drugs Masquerading As Foods: Deliciously Killing American-Afrikans and All Peoples by Suzar
I turned to this book after more than 2 years of constant pain and illness that none of my doctors could diagnose or cure. Desperate for help, I bought this book and tried most of the author's recommendations. I stopped eating white flour, grains, sugar, dairy, and certain types of fat.
Water: The Shocking Truth That Can Save Your Life by Patricia Bragg and Paul C. Bragg
Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-altering Substances by K.Ronald Siegel
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann
Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness by Jim Keith
Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
Animal Wise: The Spirit Language and Signs of Nature by Ted Andrews
To add some personal choices
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism by Stephan Kuhl
The Nazi movement rested on an occult mythology shared among many in the European elite. As such, its beliefs and rites, including royal hierarchy and racialist supremacy, are also widely shared and may be the basis of many European 'values', economic activities, and social policies - certainly in Germany, UK and USA. Many of the Nazi scientists were helped to leave Germany at the end of the European World War Two to settle in UK, USA and South Africa and to continue their work. This work continues in the Human Genome Project and in the man-ufactured diseases Ebola, Mad Cow Disease, and AIDS.
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America by Kevin Kruse
a myth-shattering book. Focusing on the city that prided itself as 'too busy to hate,' Kevin Kruse reveals the everyday ways that middle-class whites in Atlanta resisted civil rights, withdrew from the public sphere, and in the process fashioned a new, grassroots, suburban-based conservatism [that powered the new Republican and Democratic parties]. This important book has national implications for our thinking about the links between race, suburbanization, and the rise of the New Right.
Race to the Frontier: "White Flight" and Western Expansion by John Dippel
Why did so many thousands of settlers pull up stakes and undertake the arduous journey to the frontier in 18th- and 19th-century America. While the desire for a more prosperous future figured prominently in their decisions, so did another, largely overlooked factor - the presence of slavery and the growing number of blacks, both free and slave, in the eastern half of the United States. Poor white farmers, particularly those in the Upper South, found themselves displaced by the spreading of the plantation system. In order to survive economically they were chronically forced to move further inland. As they did so... they sought to erect legal barriers to prevent slavery from taking hold as well as to deter the migration of free blacks who would otherwise compete for jobs and endanger white society.
Yakub & The Origins Of White Supremacy: Message To The White Man & Woman In America by Dorothy Blake
Blacked Out Through Whitewash: Exposing the Quantum Deception/Rediscovering and Recovering Suppressed Melanated by Suzar
Websites
The Mankind Quarterly
The Occidental Quarterly
Monday, August 20, 2007
globalising inequality
"we have divorced how economies are doing, from how the people are doing.
The worse the suffering of the poor, the stronger the stock exchange performs, the higher the GDP reported, the better the economy is said to perform"
Globalising Inequality
The award-winning development reporter and photojournalist, Palagummi Sainath, is India's foremost chronicler of the impact of Globalization on the country's rural populations.
The worse the suffering of the poor, the stronger the stock exchange performs, the higher the GDP reported, the better the economy is said to perform"
Globalising Inequality
The award-winning development reporter and photojournalist, Palagummi Sainath, is India's foremost chronicler of the impact of Globalization on the country's rural populations.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Awake Afrikans: You have been warned.
Africa is the cornerstone of the new world order. To understand this imperialistic order, one must become familiar with the concepts of dialectic reasoning and doublespeak rhetorics. The dialectic mindset was espoused by the faustian philosopher Georg Hegel. Africans are now familiar with the doublespeak rhetoric of "we are giving Africa 'foreign aid' while actually planting seeds of perpetual weakness and fanning the flames of self-destruction.
Both concepts come together in Albert Pike's tome: Morals & Dogma. Freemasonry's organisations in USA are implicated as instrumental to success of the KKK (project of the Scottish Rite),the secessionist Confederate Army, and the Democratic (Dixiecrats) party.
Freemasonry IS the intellectual, if not the true religious, basis of culture among elites in modern Europe (including the USA) where it is the dialectic opposite of christianity, and in modern Arabia where it is the dialectic opposite of islam-mohammedanism, and in the United Nations where it is cloaks the Lucis Trust with the cloth of Humanism.
The Antipasministries reveals the Dominionism agenda of the Euro-USA empire in Africa as it is implemented through religious brain-washing, disease infestation, poverty and debt bondage, slave-plantation labour, puppet governments, dumb education, mis-information, and resurgent chaos. Unchecked by Afrikans' awakening and vigilance, this agenda may lead to a new eugenics war logic of Africa without the Afrikans.
Note the role in Africa, Caribbeans and South America of 'aid workers' and 'non-governmental organisations (NGO)' in weakening governments, destabilising countries, and acting as scouts.
The Centre for Research on Globalisation highlights A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy. This military positioning across the continent is largely unreported in the news media. It is the central theatre for the Project for New American Century, the think tank based in Washington DC, USA, although their report (download) in true dialectical style does not appear to concern itself with Africa. The Antipasminitries paper shows how Euro-USA's wealth is built on the back of Africa's poverty.
See also:
wake up America
Secret Societies
Both concepts come together in Albert Pike's tome: Morals & Dogma. Freemasonry's organisations in USA are implicated as instrumental to success of the KKK (project of the Scottish Rite),the secessionist Confederate Army, and the Democratic (Dixiecrats) party.
Freemasonry IS the intellectual, if not the true religious, basis of culture among elites in modern Europe (including the USA) where it is the dialectic opposite of christianity, and in modern Arabia where it is the dialectic opposite of islam-mohammedanism, and in the United Nations where it is cloaks the Lucis Trust with the cloth of Humanism.
The Antipasministries reveals the Dominionism agenda of the Euro-USA empire in Africa as it is implemented through religious brain-washing, disease infestation, poverty and debt bondage, slave-plantation labour, puppet governments, dumb education, mis-information, and resurgent chaos. Unchecked by Afrikans' awakening and vigilance, this agenda may lead to a new eugenics war logic of Africa without the Afrikans.
Note the role in Africa, Caribbeans and South America of 'aid workers' and 'non-governmental organisations (NGO)' in weakening governments, destabilising countries, and acting as scouts.
The Centre for Research on Globalisation highlights A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy. This military positioning across the continent is largely unreported in the news media. It is the central theatre for the Project for New American Century, the think tank based in Washington DC, USA, although their report (download) in true dialectical style does not appear to concern itself with Africa. The Antipasminitries paper shows how Euro-USA's wealth is built on the back of Africa's poverty.
See also:
wake up America
Secret Societies
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