Govt Changes Tax Policy

Seth Tekper, Finance Minister

The Government has introduced several tax policies to ensure the development of all the major sectors of the economy to enhance development.

Mr Seth Terkper, Minister of Finance and Economic Planning, in his presentation of the 2015 Budget Statement to Parliament, on Wednesday, said several incentives had also been planned to support the growth of local industries.

The Breweries, which use local raw materials as substitutes for their imported raw materials and other companies are targeted beneficiaries.

He said the object of this local content policy was to increase employment opportunities, reduce the import bill, as well as increase capital investment and acquisition of new technology.

Mr Terkper said the government would review the policy to ensure greater efficiency and compliance by the beneficiaries and in the process while the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) would introduce appropriate guidelines and make recommendations for improvement.    

He said in contrast excise duty rate on tobacco products would be increased from 150 per cent to 175 per cent to reduce the consumption of tobacco and its related health hazards.

According to him, Ghana's excise tax as a percentage of cigarette prices, was one of the lowest in the region and it had been estimated that the excise tax as a percentage of retail price was 14 per cent, while the average for Africa was 33 per cent.

Mr Terkper said it had also been established that in order to reduce the consumption of tobacco and its related health hazards, excise tax should be 70 per cent of the retail price, but in pursuance of these goals the excise duty rate would be increased from 150 percent to 175 percent.   

He said in 2014, the GRA made it a must for all taxpayers to acquire Tax Identification Numbers (TIN) before transacting business at the various ports, therefore, tax payers were also    required to declare what tax office number they paid their taxes to customs authorities.

He said in conjunction with the National Identification Authority (NIA), the requirement of the TIN would be extended to other sectors to facilitate the identification of eligible taxpayers, and to ensure that the status of persons on the Taxpayer Register were accurate, they would be required to validate their data every two years.

He also said 10 years of implementing of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), with the passage of the Value Added Tax (VAT) Act 2013, (Act 870) to include fee-based financial services and real estates in taxable activities, the National Health Insurance Act would be amended to conform to the new provisions to generate additional resources for the scheme.      

The Finance Minister said as part of its policy to support local industries, Government, in the 2014 Budget removed import duties and VAT on raw materials used for locally produced exercise and text books under the supervision of Ministry of Education and HIV/AIDS drugs under the supervision of the Ministry of Health.

In addition to these measures, he said, the Government was in 2015 proposing to remove VAT on specified locally produced pharmaceuticals and some of the raw materials used for the production of these pharmaceuticals.

The exemption policy, he said, would be based on VAT on a select list of special essential medicines not manufactured in Ghana and approved by the Minister of Health to ensure neutrality and reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals sold in Ghana and make them more affordable to Ghanaians.

The Government, he said, would also remove import duty and VAT on inputs for the production of machetes and also the production of exercise books and textbooks for the benefit of farmers and the printing industry.

He said it was being proposed that in order to increase smart phone penetration, and in line with Government's policy of bridging the digital divide within the country, import duties on smartphones would be removed to increase their penetration and raise revenue from Communication Service Tax, VAT and corporate taxes.

Editorial 

UNNECESSARY TROUBLE!

Sometimes the Government does not help itself by creating favorable conditions for the spread of rumours and half baked truth.

 Why doesn’t the Government explain all its actions in a transparent and truthful manner?

Only last week, the people of Ghana were told that the Managing Director of the Electricity Company of the Ghana (ECG) has been reassigned to the Ministry.

 We were not told why it has become necessary to reassign the boss of ECG but in the light of current difficulties in the power sector it was immediately assumed that poor performance accounted for this move.

 In our view, the Government may have very good reason or reassigning the boss of ECG but because they were not stated, it has given room for speculation and rumour.

Now, the word on the street is that the gentleman has been removed because of his opposition to the privatisation of the ECG.

Is this true and if it is not true then what is the real reason for his reassignment?

   

Nyaboe cries over lack of power

The lack of access to electricity supply has become a huge dilemma and a major worry to developers at Nyaboe in the Asante-Akim Central Municipality.

Many people, who have built houses in the community, are unable to move into their property because of the difficulty of getting power connected to their places.

The town holds major attraction to developers given its proximity to the municipal capital, Konongo, as they keep steadily streaming there to acquire building plots.

Mr. Daniel Kwasi Adarkwa, the assembly member, told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that they found the electricity supply situation not only disappointing but quite troubling.

He said it had become a big disincentive to potential developers, slowing down the expansion of the area.

Reporters of the Agency had visited the town under STAR-Ghana’s sponsored media auditing and tracking of development projects, an initiative launched to put the spotlight on how government’s resources were helping to transform the lives of the people, particularly those in the rural communities.

The goal is to aid transparency, promote accountability and good local governance.

Mr. Adarkwa said he had raised the matter with both the municipal assembly and officials of the electricity company of Ghana (ECG) but the problem remained unresolved.

He appealed to the power providers to take immediate steps address the unhealthy development.

Government should implement Tobacco Tax Policy

The Vision for Alternative Development (VALD), a non-governmental organisation, has appealed to President John Dramani Mahama to reject tobacco industry interferences in developing national Tobacco Tax Policy.

“The recent proposal from the Ministry of Finance … on 50 per cent Tobacco Tax increment is indeed a call in the right direction as raising the price of cigarettes is the principal measure for discouraging consumption and avoiding the initiation of tobacco use among children and youth.

“Reduced tobacco consumption will result in a healthier and more productive workforce, which will help boost the economy,” a statement signed by Mr Labram Musah, Programmes Director of VALD and copied to Ghana News Agency has said.

“We are humbly and urgently calling on the President of Ghana not to regard British American Tobacco and their allies in attempting to interfere with government commitments regarding tax measures to reduce the demand for tobacco products under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

“We want government to stay focus and remain resolute in this bold initiative to protect its citizens from deadly tobacco products.”

Mr Musah said the FCTC had been ratified by 179 countries including Ghana to protect more than 88 per cent of the world population from the harmful effects of tobacco use.

“We want to urge government to constantly keep in mind the first guiding principle of the FCTC Article 5.3 that states: ‘There is a fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between the interests of tobacco industry and those of public health.

Mr Musah said the FCTC has clearly stated that, while “setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control," countries are legally obligated to "protect these policies from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry”.

He said this principle was endorsed by all United Nations Member States during the September 2011 adoption of the Political Declaration of the High-level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases, wherein they acknowledged that "there is a fundamental conflict of interests between the tobacco industry and public health." (Political Declaration, Point 38)

At the just ended FCTC Sixth Conference of the Parties (COP6) in Russia Federation-Moscow in October, 2014, one big good news was the adoption of guidelines on FCTC Article 6 (price and tax measures to reduce tobacco use.

The Tobacco Industry, via the International Tax and Investment Centre and various pro-industry delegates, made an attempt to stop the adoption, but in the end this merely stiffened the resolve of most Parties including Ghana.

The guidelines passed without change was to serve as a key tool and resource for tax administration and policy developments.

Mr Musah said: “We are not surprise that the Tobacco Industry and its allies are making attempt to thwart this noble efforts of government to protect its citizens from the deadly tobacco product by continuing to provide their baseless arguments that they create employment and also generates revenue for government forgetting that governments all over the world spend a lot of money to treat tobacco diseases such as lung cancer, oral cancer, neck cancer, heart diseases, stroke and extreme poverty among others.

“Ghana is already over- burdened with numerous communicable and non-communicable diseases and cannot afford a double burden to include other non-communicable diseases such as tobacco related disease.

Tobacco use is destroying the youth as such tough measures such as high tax increment and innovative tax regime must be put in place to curb the alarming situation.

He said cigarettes products are the cheapest commodity one could find in the market and the price is as low as 10 Ghana pesewas per stick.

Multiple studies from around the world confirm that higher taxes on cigarettes would prevent people from starting to smoke, encourage them to quit, and reduce the quantity of cigarettes smoked.

Tobacco use currently costs the world hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

Healthcare costs associated with tobacco related illnesses are extremely high.

In the United States, annual tobacco-related healthcare costs amount to 96 billion dollars; in Germany, seven billion dollars; in Australia, one billion dollars.

Tobacco-related illnesses and premature mortality impose high productivity costs to the economy because of sick workers and those who die prematurely during their working years.

“While we are calling on government to be resolute in its decision to increase tobacco taxation we are also appealing to government to direct the Attorney General’s Department to urgently complete the Tobacco Control Legislative Instrument for Parliamentary adoption to effectively implement the Tobacco Control Measures of the ACT 851 to reduce the tobacco related deaths.

The VALD also cautioned the Tobacco industry and their affiliates to desist from interfering in public health policy decisions that are aimed at reducing the incidence of tobacco use and exposure and to minimise tobacco related deaths and diseases.

Thomas Sankara and the Black Spring in Burkina Faso

Sankara and Fidel Castro

By James Robb ·

Blaise Compaoré, the president of Burkina Faso who was forced to resign by mass protests on October 31, was more than simply a dictator who had clung to power for 27 years. Compaoré was the leader of a counter-revolution, a traitor, who holds the responsibility for the murder of one of the finest thinkers and fighters of the twentieth century, Thomas Sankara. Compaoré’s coup brought an end to the magnificent Burkina Faso revolution of 1983-87.

Better than any other struggle of last century, the revolution in Burkina Faso proved that slavery was not the inescapable fate of any people, that the road of revolutionary struggle for independence and human dignity was open in even the poorest countries of the world.

For Upper Volta (as the country was known at the beginning of the revolution) was poor by any measure. In 1981, the third decade after its independence in 1960, infant mortality stood at 208 for every 1000 live births – the highest in the world. A staggering 92% of the population was illiterate – 98% in the countryside, where 90% of the population lived. Less than one child in five attended school. A compulsory head tax dating from the days of French colonial rule was still enforced, and in addition to that, peasants had semi-feudal obligations to perform labour for village chiefs. Average annual income was US$150; there was one doctor per 50,000 people.

The technology of agriculture was such that only 10% of farmers were using animals to pull the plough; the rest had to make do with basic hand tools. As the Sahara Desert advanced steadily southward – the consequence of imperialist-imposed patterns of agriculture and trade – drought and famine plagued the country. The disease onchocerciasis, or river blindness, caused many thousands to lose their eyesight in the regions close to rivers, accelerating depopulation of the best fertile lands. With very little access to electricity, or even kerosene or gas, wood was the main cooking fuel in both city and countryside, leading to rapid deforestation.

There was a tiny working class, made up of some 20,000 factory workers in small handicrafts and manufacturing, a further 10,000 workers in construction, public works, and transportation, and about 40,000 civil servants, teachers and the like. (The total population at that time was about 7 million – it has more than doubled in the period since then). The only modern factories were some cotton and textile mills and a handful of other light manufacturing plants.

This extreme poverty and backward class structure was inherited by the revolutionary government of Thomas Sankara which came to power on August 4, 1983. Sankara’s government set up Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, which mobilised the population to begin solving these problems.

Sankara put forward a clear picture of the class forces supporting and opposed to the revolution in his Political Orientation Speech in October 1983, which served as the strategic perspective of the new government. In its detailed class analysis of Voltaic society, this speech often calls to mind the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.

Speaking of the independence of Upper Volta from France in 1960, he said, “From the masses’ point of view, it was a democratic reform, while from that of imperialism it was a change of the forms of domination and exploitation of our people…Voltaic nationals were to take over as agents for foreign domination.”

Sankara describes the enemies of the popular revolution, for whom “our revolution will be the most authoritarian thing there is; it will be an act through which the people impose their will by all available means, including arms if necessary.

“Who are these enemies of the people? … They are 1. The Voltaic bourgeoisie, [including] the state bourgeoisie…that has used its political monopoly to enrich itself in an illicit and indecent manner… the commercial bourgeoisie, by its very activity linked to imperialism by numerous ties, and the middle bourgeoisie, [which] has grievances against imperialism but also fears the people…We must cultivate among the people a revolutionary mistrust of such elements.    2. The reactionary forces who base their power on the traditional, feudal-type structures of our society…who in their majority were able to put up staunch resistance to French colonial imperialism, but since our country gained national sovereignty they have joined forces with the reactionary bourgeoisie to oppress the Voltaic people. [They] most frequently rely on the decaying values of our traditional culture that still persist in rural areas [and] will oppose our revolution to the extent that it democratises social relations in the countryside.

“The people, in the current revolution, are composed of: 1. The Voltaic working class… a genuinely revolutionary class. In the current revolution, it is a class that has everything to gain and nothing to lose. It has no means of production to lose, it has no piece of property to defend within the framework of the old neo-colonial society. To the contrary, it is convinced that the revolution is its own, because it will emerge from the revolution more numerous and stronger.

“2. The petty bourgeoisie, which constitutes a vast social layer that is very unstable and that often vacillates between the cause of the popular masses and that of imperialism. In its great majority, it always ends up taking the side of the popular masses. It is composed of diverse elements, including small traders, petty-bourgeois intellectuals (government employees, students, private sector employees and so on), and artisans.

“3. The Voltaic peasantry. … Market relations have increasingly dissolved communal bonds and replaced them with private property in the means of production… The Voltaic peasant, tied to small-scale production, embodies bourgeois productive relations…It is the social layer that has had to pay the highest price for imperialist domination and exploitation. The economic and cultural backwardness that characterises our countryside has kept it isolated from the main currents of progress and modernisation, relegating it to the role of a reservoir for reactionary political parties. Nevertheless, the peasantry has a stake in the revolution and in terms of numbers is its principal force.

“4. The lumpenproletariat, a layer of declassed elements who, since they are without work, are inclined to hire themselves out to reactionary and counterrevolutionary forces to carry out the latter’s dirty work. To the extent that the revolution can win them over by giving them something useful to do, they can become its fervent defenders.”

Within this class framework, with the obstacles ahead clearly in sight, Sankara and the Burkinabè masses set to work to transform social relations in Burkina Faso with confidence and revolutionary optimism. A few of Sankara’s speeches were filmed and are available on YouTube, mostly in French, some with English subtitles or with live translators. They are well worth searching out: nothing conveys the sense of hope and optimism the Burkina Faso revolution represented better than these.  Many more are available in the French and English versions of Thomas Sankara Speaks, a collection of his speeches and interviews from which this article was mostly drawn.

Tribute payments and obligatory labour by peasants to traditional chiefs were abolished, as was the head tax. An agrarian reform nationalised all land and mineral wealth and made the land available to small farmers. Irrigation projects were implemented. Stern measures against corruption were adopted, symbolised by the change of the name of the country to Burkina Faso – land of upright people – on the first anniversary of the revolution in August 1984.

With support from Cuban volunteers, a fifteen-day immunisation campaign in November 1984 succeeded in immunising 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles. A conference of 3,000 delegates on the national budget decided to deduct one month’s pay from the salaries of top civil servants and military officers to help pay for social development projects. The entire fleet of extravagant official vehicles was sold off, and the Renault 5, the cheapest car sold in Burkina Faso at the time, was made the official vehicle for all civil servants and government personnel, including the president himself.

All residential rents were suspended in 1985, and a massive programme of construction of public housing was begun. A ‘Battle for the Railroad’ was launched in February 1985 to build a new railway to the northeastern region of Tambao, in order to develop a major manganese deposit.

A campaign to plant 10 million trees was launched, to slow down the advance of the Sahara, and buying or renting the new housing units was made conditional on the new owner or tenant planting and caring for a minimum number of trees. The CDRs of women and youth mobilised to build tens of thousands of improved stoves in order to reduce the consumption of firewood. Hundreds of wells were sunk to provide reliable drinking water to those who lacked it. An old, partly-abandoned tradition of each town and village cultivating its own grove of trees was revived. In the villages in the developed river valleys, each family was given the means and the obligation to plant one hundred trees per year. The cutting and selling of firewood was brought under strict control.

Sankara explained the revolution’s battle against the encroachment of the desert as “a battle to establish a balance between man, nature, and society…Our struggle to defend the trees and the forest is first and foremost a democratic struggle that must be waged by the people. The sterile and expensive excitement of a handful of engineers and forestry experts will accomplish nothing! Nor can the tender consciences of a multitude of forums and institutions – sincere and praiseworthy as they may be – make the Sahel green again, when we lack the funds to drill wells for drinking water just a hundred meters deep, and money abounds to drill oil wells three thousand meters deep!”

The revolutionary government tied its fate to progress towards the liberation of women. “The weight of the centuries-old traditions of our society has relegated women to the status of beasts of burden”, Sankara said. “By changing the social order that oppresses women, the revolution creates the conditions for their genuine emancipation.

“We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or because of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the triumph of the revolution.”

A national conference on women’s emancipation in Ouagadougou in March 1985 drew 3,000 participants. Female genital mutilation was banned. The second anniversary of the revolution in August 1985 featured an all-female parade, emphasising the steps towards female equality.

In 1986 a literacy campaign, conducted in nine indigenous languages, taught reading and writing to 35,000 people. River blindness was largely brought under control, with the aid of a United Nations programme. Basic health care services were made available to millions for the first time, and infant mortality fell to 145 per 1000 live births by 1985.

The revolutionary government adopted a stance of international solidarity with popular political struggles. Sankara took the occasion of the visit of French President Francois Mitterand to denounce France’s ties to the Apartheid regime in South Africa. He solidarised with revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada, and with liberation struggles in Namibia and Western Sahara. In New York to give a speech at the United Nations, he addressed a Black audience in Harlem declaring, “our White House is in Black Harlem.”

The key to these conquests was drawing the working people into political activity in their own interests. The Burkinabè people, Sankara explained over and over, had to be the initiators of social and political change, not the resigned and passive objects of a government bureaucracy and military officer caste. “The democratic and popular revolution needs a convinced people, not a conquered people – a people that is truly convinced, not submissive and passively enduring its destiny,” he said.

These advances were not welcomed by all layers of Burkinabè society. Some in the civil service bureaucracy resented the encroachments on their privileges. Teachers launched a strike against the revolutionary government. A counter-revolutionary plot linked to a pro-imperialist exile was uncovered and suppressed in 1984.

Opponents of the revolution resented above all the active intervention of the organised Burkinabè masses.  “You had the impression that the whole of Burkina Faso was a military barracks” one critic of Sankara recalled 25 years later. “There were not any unions or youth organisations, at least no independent ones. Committees for the Defence of the Revolution [CDRs] were imposed on everything. There was a CDR for the youth, a CDR for women, a CDR for farmers, CDR unions.”

To some layers of society the revolution felt, as Sankara had explained in the Political Orientation Speech, “the most authoritarian thing there is.”

Did Sankara anticipate the treachery of Compaoré, his former close friend and comrade, the man whose march on Ouagadougou to free Sankara from jail had opened the revolution in 1983?  That he knew of the specific counter-revolutionary plot by Compaoré seems unlikely. However, Sankara was clearly aware of the dangers and risks inherent in the revolutionary process, and he warned of these dangers in his speech on the fourth anniversary of the revolution in August 1987, a few months before his assassination.

“Since August 4, 1983, revolutionary Burkina Faso has burst onto the African and international scene especially and above all due to the intellectual genius and moral and human virtue of its leaders and of its organised masses. We have overcome adversity and triumphed over determined and vile opponents who were armed to the teeth…

“What we need to do here above all is to note the diverse forms hostile forces can take and – since tomorrow’s battles will undoubtedly be harder and more complex – draw the lessons that will make us stronger. During the past four years of the revolution we have had to constantly confront reaction and imperialism.  They have hatched the most sordid plots aimed at sabotaging our work – or worse, overthrowing our revolution. Imperialism and reaction are and will remain fiercely opposed to the transformations that are taking place every day in our country and that threaten their interests…

“We have also seen adversity within our beloved Burkina, within our own ranks, in the camp of the revolution. Erroneous practices and ideas harmful to the revolution have, in fact, developed within the masses and among revolutionaries. We have had to combat these problems despite the relative fragility in our own ranks…

“For having chosen this path rather than the easier road of demagogy, we have been subjected to ever more slanderous attacks from both our traditional enemies and from elements who have come out of the ranks of the revolution. These elements are either impatient and smitten with the unfortunate zeal of the novice, or else they are frantically and openly pursuing personal ambitions… Others dream of throwing in the towel but have qualms about how they should do it. They also theorise in advance their desertion from the revolutionary struggle. That is why so many theories and ideas, all thoroughly imbued with opportunism, have been and still are circulating…

“The deepening of our revolution and the future success of our political activity will depend on how well we solve these problems of organisation and political orientation in our country. The revolution cannot go forward and achieve its goals without a vanguard organisation able to guide the people in all its battles and on all fronts. Forging such an organisation will require a big commitment on our part from now on.”

Compaoré’s coup put an end to the revolution before such a vanguard organisation could be built; the revolution died with its central leader.

Election poster with Blaise Compaoré as Indiana Jones. Photo: Chris Brazier New Internationalist

Blaise Compaoré, like the Stalinist faction of Bernard Coard that overthrew the revolutionary government in Grenada four years earlier, and indeed like Stalin himself some sixty years before that, chose to clothe his desertion from the revolutionary struggle in revolutionary language. The revolution would continue, he declared, but with some ‘rectification.’  Very soon, the old ties to imperialist governments and financial institutions were re-established, the old relationships of exploitation revived, and Compaoré had amassed a large personal fortune and a correspondingly large contempt for the people.

Not all of the gains of the revolution were overthrown – for example, the ban on female genital mutilation held up at least partly, as did increased enrolments at primary school. In the villages, improved access to water, sanitation, electricity, health clinics, and contraception continued to bring small improvements in the lives of subsistence farmers – a not unimportant reason why Compaoré’s government remained relatively stable for 27 years. The health clinics are not free, however – a condition of IMF and World Bank loans. Burkina Faso remains one of the poorest countries in the world. (In May 2006 the magazine New Internationalist ran some interesting articles based on two ten-yearly return visits to a Burkinabè village by a reporter who had first interviewed a woman leader of the CDR there in 1985 – the information in this paragraph is based largely on these).

One of the many thousands of Burkinabè people who rose up last week to overthrow Compaoré called the protests “Burkina Faso’s Black Spring, like the Arab Spring.” It is an apt description, combining identification with the uprisings that dislodged despotic rulers in the Arab world from December 2010 with African pride. In a fast-growing and youthful population – the median age in the country is only 17 years! – the vast majority of participants in these demonstrations have been born since Sankara’s murder. The world they inherit is a very different from the one Sankara confronted; the working class in Burkina did emerge from the revolution of 1983-87 “more numerous and stronger.” They will need to re-discover afresh the rich political legacy of Thomas Sankara and apply it in this changed situation, just as does the working class in the rest of the world.

One thing that has not changed, though, is the fact that, as Sankara told his Harlem audience, “when the people stand up, imperialism trembles.”

Credit: Pambazuka

Nigeria: As another civil war looms

President Goodluck Jonathan

By Chido Onumah

Forty-four years after the end of the Nigeria-Biafra War, Nigeria finds herself on the brink of another civil war. Nigerians have waited in vain in the last five years for those who should know to show some fortitude and speak out. Last week, a few of them did.

The suggestion, as reported by Sunday Punch (16/11/14), by retired senior military officers, including a former Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon – the man who prosecuted the Nigeria-Biafra War – asking President Goodluck Jonathan to declare “total war” on Boko Haram, the group that has terrorized Nigerians for about five years and has lately annexed parts of the country, couldn’t have come at a more auspicious time. While their tactics – cutting off food and fuel supplies to the insurgents – may be problematic, their intention is commendable. The interpretation is that Nigeria is fighting a civil war and needs to approach it as such. 

Before the latest intervention, one of Nigeria’s most respected military officers, Col Abubakar Umar (retd), had, in a strongly-worded open letter to Nigerians, proffered solutions to the current impasse. Umar was quite categorical. “I feel compelled to appeal to all Nigerians to recognize that Nigeria is indeed at war. It is a war that seems set to engulf the entire country. We need to understand that the war in the Northeast is a war against Nigeria. The insurgents intend to use a conquered Northeast as a launch pad on which to invade and conquer the rest of the country and possibly the whole of the West African sub-region,” he wrote.

Umar proposed a number of key strategies, among other things: “recall all armed forces personnel in the reserve,” “reabsorb all able-bodied and willing discharged veterans of international peacekeeping operations,” “order back to barracks all security personnel who are currently deployed on nonessential duties for retraining and redeployment to the war front in the NE,” suspension of all national celebrations and Nigeria’s participation in international sporting events until the war is won.

These are very bold propositions and I endorse them. Of course, number is not the sole or even the primary determinant of a nation’s military strength and combat readiness. Any serious effort to make today’s Nigerian Armed Forces a fighting force should address – as Col Umar also observed – the current sagging morale of our troops.

It should look into the present situation in which the troops fighting supposedly ragtag terrorists are clearly outmatched by the latter in terms of the calibre of weapons they carry, at a time defence still gulps a sizeable percentage of the national budget. It should also look into the housing of our fighting troops in befitting barracks, their kitting with appropriate uniforms and the payment of their welfare packages as and when due. All these are essential morale boosting measures for a fighting troop.

I shall go a step further and call for a moratorium on the general elections scheduled for February 2015. I pushed the same position in a September 2013 piece while the federal government was mulling over the idea of a National Conference to address, supposedly, the future of Nigeria. The idea then was that the greatest challenge facing the country was the need for it to come to terms with its history.

I argued that Nigeria – defined by a quivering colonial power in 1914 – was not working for Nigerians, at least for the majority, and that it was time to redefine Nigeria in the image of the inheritors of the contraption that was handed down a century ago. The reality is that part of the Boko Haram narrative is the fundamental defect of the Nigerian nation. Nigeria can either confront this problem headlong or continue to postpone the imminent catastrophe.

Of course, there is a political angle to the Boko Haram crisis. As far back as January 2012, President Jonathan had, during an inter-denominational service to mark the Armed Forces Remembrance Day, declared that Boko Haram had infiltrated, not just the executive, but the legislative and judicial arms of government, as well as the police and armed forces. He went on to describe the Boko Haram phenomenon as “worse than the civil war”.

That was almost three years ago. While that pronouncement may have been made to score partisan political advantage, clearly no sincere effort to deal with Boko Haram can take place in the current atmosphere of political bickering and mindless electioneering rhetoric. Faced with renewed threat by Boko Haram, the need to rethink the future of Nigeria vis-à-vis the 2015 general elections becomes even more imperative.

Nigerians have to look beyond next year’s elections in order to deal with the current danger. Evidently, either way, the 2015 elections – if they do hold – will be contentious and the consequences are better imagined. Add to that, a country ravaged by war and an economy reeling under the slump in oil prices and you have a recipe for a monumental regional crisis.

There is really no alternative to dealing with the current crisis in Nigeria other than approaching it as you approach crises that have the potentials of debasing humanity. The National Assembly should review the current war effort of the government, pass a resolution postponing the 2015 elections and give the president all the powers to mobilize Nigerians to win this war convincingly in the next one year or face impeachment.

Two weeks ago, as Boko Haram captured one town after another in Nigeria’s Northeast, leaving a trail of death and destruction, including the massacre of innocent students, I watched again the movie, Hotel Rwanda, about the Rwandan genocide, just to remind myself what can happen when those who ought to act decide to be indifferent when a band of murderous fiends that has publicly declared its intentions, decides to run amok.

Though not one to pander to the amorphous “international community”, it is important to state that those who can support Nigeria to win the current war should not wait for the humanitarian situation to worsen before they act.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “Thousands of Nigerians are escaping the deadly threat posed by the terrorist group Boko Haram and fleeing into neighbouring Cameroon. The vast majority of them are women and children….many families were forced to flee on foot, taking few belongings with them and walking tens of kilometres before finding safety in Cameroon.”

The UN agency reports that, “The ongoing refugee crisis has seen more than 100,000 people spill over into Niger’s Diffa region since the beginning of 2014, while Cameroon is currently hosting some 44,000 Nigerian refugees. Another 2,700 have fled to Chad. Meanwhile, an estimated 650,000 people remain internally displaced in north-eastern Nigeria due to the insurgency.”

Clearly, there is an international dimension to the war raging in Nigeria and I think “the international community”, specifically the US, has a role to play, because as Col. Umar stated in his intervention, “Boko Haram is well funded by AL-QAEDA in the Magrib, (AQIM) as well as the booty they acquire in the numerous territories they conquer. More than anyone else, the West knows that, like ISIL, Boko Haram constitutes monumental threat to global peace and security.”

I do not know President Obama’s Nigerian policy. Whatever it is, the so-called concern for human rights in terms of limiting its support for the Nigerian military simply doesn’t cut it. Expectedly, the Obama administration is keen on the “success” of Nigeria’s 2015 elections and its representatives will “monitor” the elections. But the question is: can we really talk about elections and democracy when the survival of Africa’s most populous nation is at stake?

Of course, in the end, this is Nigeria’s war and the Nigerian government must do everything it can to win it and safeguard the lives of Nigerians. Undoubtedly, years of mismanagement and corruption have not only served to exacerbate crises like the current one, but have also diminished our capacity as a nation to adequately deal with them.

It’s for this reason that Nigerians everywhere must rise to the challenge of the present danger!

NATO 1949: The Origin of an Offensive, Expansionist, Imperialist Military Alliance

By Mike Faulkner

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, was launched sixty five years ago following the signature of the Atlantic Pact in 1949. The original member states that came together under US tutelage claimed that their alliance was dedicated to the preservation of peace and to the defence of Western Europe against the supposed threat of military aggression. It is noteworthy that the launch of NATO coincided with the intensification of the Cold War, the political division of Germany and the first tentative steps by the US and Britain to rearm the new West German state.

In his memoirs published in 1989, Andrei Gromyko, who was Soviet Foreign Minister from the mid-1950s when he succeeded Molotov, to 1985, recounts an episode from his long career that has received scant attention in the West. It concerns the Soviet response to the establishment of NATO. It is worth quoting in full:

“In 1955 a meeting of the heads of government of the USSR, USA, Britain and France took place in Geneva. Sharp exchanges occurred revealing serious differences between the former allies. Eisenhower, Eden and Edgar Faure fiercely argued that NATO was a force for peace, especially in Europe, whereas in fact their plan was aimed at swallowing up East Germany into West Germany, and whitewashing the remilitarisation of West Germany in peace-loving propaganda.

In an effort to deprive the three Western powers of their notion that the Soviet Union was not doing its part in consolidating peace, the Soviet delegation, consisting of Khrushchev, Bulganin, Molotov, Marshal Zhukov and myself, announced that the Soviet Union was willing to join NATO.  We argued that, since NATO was dedicated to the cause of peace, it could not but agree to include the USSR.   It is hard to describe the effect this announcement had on the Western delegations when it was made by Bulganin, as President of the Council of Ministers. They were so stunned that for several minutes none of them said a word. Eisenhower’s usual vote-winning smile vanished from his face. He leaned over for a private consultation with Dulles; but we were not given a reply to our proposal.

After the meeting, Dulles caught up with me in the corridor and asked, ‘Was the Soviet Union really being serious?’ I replied, ‘The Soviet Union does not make unserious proposals, especially at such an important forum as this.’

Dulles was about to add something, when Eisenhower came up. Now a smile did appear on his face, as he said: ‘We must tell you Mr. Gromyko, that the Soviet proposal will be carefully examined by us, as it is a very serious matter.’  At later meetings of the four powers, however, it was evident the Western delegations did not wish to discuss our proposal further and they simply steered clear of it, giving mysterious, oracular smiles whenever it was mentioned. The fact is NATO simply did not know how to deal with it and so they simply hushed it up. Often I have mentioned our proposal to US officials of later generations and very few of them have ever heard of it.”

Although obvious to everyone at the time of its formation in 1949 that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance directed against the Soviet Union, its raison d’etre as such was never explicitly stated by its founders. Instead it was presented in the Western Cold War generalities common at the time as an alliance dedicated to the defence of the “Free World”, more particularly Western Europe, which faced a supposed threat of aggression by an unnamed totalitarian power or powers. NATO was supposedly dedicated to the cause of peace and the defence of small nations. The North Atlantic Treaty (April 1949) included the following signatory states: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Canada and the United States. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO membership had expanded beyond the original signatories to include Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955) and Spain (1982). The first expansion into Eastern Europe occurred in 1990 with the inclusion of the former German Democratic Republic in a united Germany. Since then twelve more states, most of them former members of the Warsaw Pact nations, joined NATO.  From the outset the alliance was dominated by the United States. Its supposed commitment to the defence of democratic nations and its claim to be a North Atlantic alliance were belied by the inclusion amongst the early member states of a fascist regime in Portugal, military dictatorship in Greece, and Turkey which bordered the Soviet Union in the Caucasus.

Dismissing  legitimate grievances as the work of insidious “outside professional agitators”

The idea that ordinary people could have legitimate grievances against their governments (ruling classes) on account of appalling corruption and super exploitation has traditionally been dismissed by US (and British) propaganda as the work of insidious “outside professional agitators.”

The conventional wisdom accepted as unassailable truth by the proponents and devotees of Western Cold War propaganda, has it that the United States and its allies who came together to form NATO were reacting in the late 1940s to a grave and imminent Soviet military threat to the “free” nations of Western Europe. Had it not been for their fortitude and unity in the face of this threat, the Red Army would have rolled westwards from Berlin and enslaved the whole of Western Europe. This would have been the prelude to the triumph of Communism on a world scale. According to this account, in 1949 NATO was the shield that defended the “Free World” in the hour of danger grim.

As usual, Izzy Stone was absolutely correct about Korea and the Cold War—but alone in blowing the whistle. The gentlemen of the patriotic “Free Press’ were not interested in such heretical matters.

This scenario now seems ludicrously fanciful even to many of the liberals who a few decades ago accepted it at face value. At the time that the Atlantic Pact was signed in 1949 the independent radical journalist, I.F. Stone, exposed the truth behind the propaganda. In a piece titled From Butter to Guns July 31, 1949, (from The Truman Era, 1945 – 1952) he noted that in promoting the Atlantic Pact, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had earlier sold the Marshall Plan to Western Europe as a response to the urgent need for economic aid to alleviate hunger and discontent, now emphasised the importance of military assistance. The “two-fold objective” of the Atlantic Pact is “first to protect the free North Atlantic Pact countries against internal aggression inspired from abroad,” and secondly to “deter aggression.”  ‘It is significant,’ Stone comments, ‘that protection against “internal aggression” is put first. Thus the primary purpose is to muster sufficient military strength to cope with popular discontent.’

 “Protecting the Free World” from Soviet agitation

The precise mission of NATO was never clearly stated by its founders, preferring to simply assign it the role of “protecting the Free World” one of the great Orwellian terms circulated by American propaganda during the Cold War. The phrase is still used everywhere in the US/Western media without much questioning.

From the earliest post-war years the United States and its subservient allies treated popular discontent in Europe as evidence of Soviet agitation. Communist parties and movements, particularly where they were strong, in France, Greece and Italy were regarded solely as agents of the USSR; industrial unrest, mass popular movements and strikes were treated as “internal aggression” stirred up by Soviet agents. Fear was engendered of a “World Communist Conspiracy”, much in the manner of the Nazi “World Judeo-Bolshevik Conspiracy” nonsense that had preceded it several years earlier. This was the atmosphere in which NATO came into being. To understand it more fully it is necessary, however briefly, to consider the pivotal question of Germany. Here, a few simple facts, well established but almost always ignored in the western Cold War narrative, need repeating:

Between 1941 and 1944 the Soviet Union played by far the greatest part in the defeat of Nazi Germany, at a cost of between 20 and 25 million dead and about a third of its industrial base and  units of human habitation destroyed. At the Yalta conference in February 1945 the allies agreed a plan to partition post-war Germany temporarily into zones of occupation and to carry through a thoroughgoing process of de-Nazification. In recognition of the immense sacrifices the Soviet Union had suffered in winning the war for the allies, it was agreed in principle that she should receive 50% ($10 billion) of the $20 billion in reparations Germany would be required  to pay. Churchill objected,  but Roosevelt accepted it as a basis for negotiation. Stalin was determined to stand firm on this. It was agreed to return Western Russia and the Ukraine to the Soviet Union.

At Potsdam in July/August 1945 it was agreed that the partition of Germany was not to be permanent and that the allies were to work together to achieve the de-Nazification of the country and the peaceful unification of the four occupation zones.  In the two years that followed Potsdam it became clear that the Western powers had no intention of allowing the Soviets to claim $10 billion in reparations in any form. In the Western zones the occupation powers interpreted  “de-Nazification” very differently from the Soviets.In the West many former members of the Nazi or pro-Nazi ruling elite were allowed to return to public life, often in key positions,  and had their property restored. Many who were imprisoned were released after having long sentences commuted. In the Soviet zone much of the industrial base was dismantled and despatched to the USSR as war reparations. Here de-Nazification resulted in the large-scale nationalisation of capitalist enterprises that had been owned by powerful Nazis. All members of the Nazi Party who had occupied influential positions in the Third Reich were dismissed and those guilty of crimes severely punished. These measures were denounced by the US and its allies as a Soviet attempt to “communize” East Germany as a first step to destabilising the Western zones as a prelude to taking over the whole of Germany and Western Europe.

In the anti-communist propaganda onslaught of the late 1940s, the Soviets were accused of violating the terms of the Potsdam agreement concerning the division of Germany. The record shows that on the contrary, it was the Western powers that were in breach of Potsdam. The agreement stipulated that the wartime allies should work together to establish a unified, neutral, de-militarized and de-Nazified Germany. No one occupying power, or exclusive grouping of such powers was permitted to set up a separate state in any part of Germany. In fact by 1948 that is precisely what the Western powers were planning to do in the three Western zones. Plans for this were being made at the London conference convened in 1948, from which the Soviet Union was excluded. A new currency (the Deutschmark) was being planned for the new West German state. It would also be introduced, without Soviet agreement, into Berlin. The Soviets took the view, which was perfectly logical, that if the Western powers were to tear up the Potsdam agreement by establishing a separate state in the West, they were thereby abrogating their right to retain their occupation sectors in Berlin which lay 100 miles inside the Soviet zone of Germany, and to introduce the DM without their agreement . The Soviet Union was therefore entirely within its rights to close all land access from the Western zones into Berlin.

The blockade and airlift that lasted from June 1948 to May 1949 marked a critical intensification in the Cold War. Before the lifting of the blockade Britain and the other Atlantic Pact states had set up NATO. In October the Federal Republic of Germany had come into being with the full agreement and sponsorship of the US and NATO. This was followed almost immediately by the Soviet response – endorsement of a separate state in the East, the German Democratic Republic.

Thereafter NATO spearheaded US imperialist nuclear and military expansion on an ever-expanding scale. During the Eisenhower administration (1952-1960), under Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, this extended to the Middle East and South East Asia with the establishment of new military alliances CENTO and SEATO.

As is clear from Gromyko’s observations in 1955, the overriding Soviet concern for many years after the Second World War was with Germany. Stalin was desperate to prevent a German state, allied with a deeply hostile USA, once again becoming a strong military power. This preoccupation was crucial in his relations with his former wartime allies from 1945 until his death in 1953. One does not have to excuse his domestic record or his controversial treatment of his East European satellites to recognise the validity of this concern and to understand his determination to maintain a reliable buffer zone of states on his Western flank. He had no intention of invading Western Europe. There was real fear of a rearmed Germany, hardly surprising after the Soviet experience during the war.

But the US and the NATO states were determined to rearm Western Germany after 1949. In Britain, for example, what was almost certainly a deliberate propaganda campaign was launched from the early 1950s to whitewash the Wehrmacht by romanticising the role of Erwin Rommel in two feature films. Documentary films about the Nazi concentration camps were withdrawn and the full horror of the Nazi genocide of the Jews was played down. Attempts to keep these horrors in the public domain were denounced as communist propaganda. The term “Holocaust” was never used, and it was implied that reference to it stirred up “anti-German” sentiment.

In March 1952, in another episode which has almost been written out of the history of the Cold War, Stalin offered the Western powers the possibility of German reunification on the basis of nation-wide democratic elections, on condition that a unified Germany would be neutral and de-militarised. The USSR proposed “a unified democratic and peace-loving German government in accordance with the Potsdam provisions – with all foreign troops withdrawn from its territory; it would be permitted armed forces on a scale “necessary for the defence of the country.”

Chancellor Adenauer rejected the proposal out of hand. The US government also rejected it, dismissing it as a devious ploy that Stalin did not mean seriously. But there is every reason to suppose that Stalin meant it very seriously. He was ready to sacrifice the government of the German Democratic Republic in favour of a unified Germany of a very different political character as long as it was neutral and demilitarised. One might refer to Gromyko’s riposte to Dulles (above) on the Soviet Union’s application to join NATO: “The Soviet Union does not make unserious proposals.” James Warburg, a member of the US Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations testified on March 28. 1952 that while in his opinion the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, “that our government is afraid to call the bluff for fear that it may not be a bluff at all”, and that it might lead to a “free, neutral and demilitarised Germany.”

But what could possibly have been a major turning point in European history was not to be. Within a few years a rearmed Germany was in NATO and by 1957 a former Wehrmacht officer, General Hans Speidel ( who had in 1944 saved his own life by betraying Rommel’s minimal role in the officer’s plot against Hitler) was appointed Commander in Chief of Allied NATO land forces in Europe.

FAO official favours gender parity in production

Closing the gender gap in agriculture would accelerate significant economic gains in developing countries, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has said.

Ms Tacko Ndiaye, FAO Africa Region Senior Officer for Gender, Equality and Rural Development said, if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20 to 30 per cent.

This, she said could raise total agricultural output in developing countries by 2.5 per cent to four  per cent, which could in turn reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 12 per cent to 17 per cent.

“Policy interventions can help close the gender gap in agriculture and labour markets,” Ms Ndiaye stated on Sunday in Accra in an interview with Ghana News Agency before her departure for the Beijing Plus 20 Conference slated for November 17 – November 19, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

She pointed out that priority areas for policy reform include eliminating discrimination against women in access to agriculture resources especially land, education, extension and financial services and labour markets.

According to her gender responsive agricultural value chains and facilitating the participation of African women in flexible, efficient and fair rural labour markets and ensuring that rural women benefit from the pledge made by African Heads of States to allocate 10 per cent of their national budget to agriculture were some of the priority areas.

Ms Ndiaye said there was the need to mainstream gender in agriculture sector development especially along value chains which involves access to support services especially credit and financial services.

The Senior Officer said women make essential contributions to agricultural growth and transformation in Africa, adding that women were frontline nutrition care givers for families and communities.

According to the FAO, women comprise 50 per cent of the agricultural labour force in Sub-Saharan Africa, while a 2014 World Bank report states that women’s labour contribution to crop production ranges from 24 per cent to 56 per cent in six countries; namely Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

She said agriculture plays a predominant role in promoting women’s empowerment, and women in Africa are bound to agriculture for their livelihoods and food security.

She observed that the Malabo declaration on “Accelerated Agricultural Growth and Transformation for Shared Prosperity and Improved Livelihoods”. adopted by the African Union Heads of States Summit in June, 2014 expressed concerns that significant proportion of Africa’s population still remains vulnerable to challenges of economic marginalisation, hunger and malnutrition, despite the positive achievements registered recently in agriculture and economic growth’.

Ms Ndiaye said the Malabo declaration reiterated the high level political commitment to end “hunger and malnutrition”, and ensure through targeted and deliberate public support that all segments of population, particularly women, youth and other disadvantaged groups participate and directly benefit from the growth and transformation opportunities to improve their lives and livelihoods.

She noted that the Beijing 20 Plus Conference provides a great opportunity to advocate agricultural growth and transformation that fully benefit women.

Nearly two decades ago at the Fourth World Conference on Women (1995), the 189 Member States of the United Nations adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action.

The Declaration was a statement of the political commitment by governments to work towards equality between men and women with a special focus on women’s empowerment.

The Beijing Declaration called for commitment at the highest political level to support its implementation and urged governments to take the leading role in coordinating, monitoring and assessing progress in the advancement of women.

GNA