Ntokozo Khumalo: The dirty -- breeding war -- games the South African government plays to win votes.

When welfare is a curse

So why exactly is the government giving poor people welfare child support grants, if it will not make any real difference in most welfare earning homes? Why Would you want to earn your keep when you have the opportunity to raise the country's population - and get paid for it?! Then it hit me! politics. The ANC and more specifically, our dear ol' president Jacob Zuma will be guaranteed millions of votes thanks to this sly move.

29 November 2012, 16:54 | News 24 | Ntokozo Khumalo

Earlier this year reports came out that the number of South Africans receiving social grants, will swell to over 16.7 million people over the next three years. This was according to the 2012/2013 budget tabled in Parliament.

I can honestly say that I now understand why this is. In my humble opinion, it has nothing to do with being previously disadvantaged, poverty or even the difficulty of finding employment in South Africa.

The problem points to an issue raised by Bob Collins for the Government of South Australia about 6 years ago. That automatic and unconditional welfare payments discourage people from seeking employment.

This is a sad fact, and I speak out of personal experience when I say fact. I have people in my own family receiving grant money, but are perfectly capable, smart young people. Would you want to earn your keep when you have the opportunity to raise the country's population - and get paid for it?!

Bill Cosby: 'We cannot blame the white people any longer.'

Bill Cosby: 'We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.. We cannot blame the white people any longer.'

Excerpts from Bill Cosby's Speech at 17 May 2004 NAACP event commemorating Brown v. Board of Education

Andrea Muhrrteyn | 20 January 2013 | SQSwans

Brown or black versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

We have got to take the neighborhood back.

People used to be ashamed. Today a woman has eight children with eight different 'husbands' -- or men or whatever you call them now.

We have millionaire football players who cannot read.

We have million-dollar basketball players who can't write two paragraphs. We, as black folks have to do a better job.

Someone working at Wal-Mart with seven kids, you are hurting us.

We have to start holding each other to a higher standard..

We cannot blame the white people any longer."

George LiveLeak: CNN Bans "George Cleaners Battle for a Community Garden" IReport

CNN Bans "George Cleaners Battle for a Community Garden" IReport

CNN Ban's Interview with George Cleaner, Flora Burts, about her battle with the Municipality and community to transform a township municipal property from a filthy rubbish dump to community gardens. Perhaps CNN does not believe that poor or non-white people are entitled to community gardens? Something only rich people are entitled to?

Andrea Muhrrteyn | George Leaks | 13 January 2013

A letter from a Zimbabwean to Julius Malema

A letter from a Zimbabwean to Julius Malema

Vince Musewe says country's mineral resources are controlled by the Chinese and Zanu-PF (not the people)

Vince Musewe | 16 October 2012 | Politicsweb

Letter to Julius Malema on Zimbabwe

If uncollected rubbish dumps, lack of running clean water and a dilapidating infrastructure inspire you Julius, then I suppose you should relocate to Harare.

Greetings to you Julius. I am sure you will note that this is my second letter to you on the same subject matter.

I understand that you visited my country Zimbabwe recently, and that you continue to be inspired by how ZANU (PF) has decimated our economy and its potential. Well, Julius, I dare say that your standards are obviously not that high and I forgive you for that. You see, this is the case with most black Africans; all you have to do is look throughout Africa to realise that the black man, left to his own devices, has dismally failed to raise his standard of living despite having all the resources he needs.

Problem Solving Black Leaders Trayvon Martin -- Defining the Problem -- Wisdom

Problem Solving Black Leaders Trayvon Martin Wisdom

Habeus Mentem | CNN IReport | 2 April 2012

‘If I have one hour to save the world I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution.’ - Einstein

When it comes to so-called leaders I differentiate between 'problem solving' and 'parasite leeching'.

Problem solving are focussed on finding the root causes of problem and simply clarifying it for better understanding by all; whereas parasite leeching leaders (sic) focus is to perpetuate the problem indefinitely while socio-politically exploiting the problem for personal gain, by means of manipulating the emotions of ‘followers’, related to the symptoms of the problem. If the bath is overflowing, problem solvers focus on turning off the tap; whereas parasite leeches focus on profiting from endlessly mopping up the floor.

The following articles are what I consider to be the crème de la crème of black Problem Solving leaders advice on the Trayvon Martin Problem:

Forsaking Gandhian Non-violence, honour & character.. the ANC-Frakenstein spawned a Gov. of comrade-tsotsis, gangsters & kleptomaniacs

Racist, sexist, violent-peddling, Malema hate-talk dangerous for the future

By Mphutlane wa Bofelo
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 10:47am

The tendency to project the racist, sexist, violent-peddling and hate-talk of Julius Malema as just a normal expression of the fervor, overzealousness and recklessness of youth is a deliberate attempt to take focus away from sober, critical, vigilant, intellectual, innovative and creative voices and faces among the youth.

Unfortunately the glorification of thoughtless action and the “diss-missing” of theory and marginalization of analytical minds have had dire and ghastly consequences for the country. The problems that the country has with regard to the violent nature of crime, apathetically low levels of respect of life, lack of appreciation of the self and indifference to parental guidance could be traced to the era in our history when we lionized youths who acted without first getting theoretical clarity of the situation facing them and weighing critically the strategic and tactical choices available to them.

Socio-Politico Poverty Pimping Pity Parties: Welfare Breeding-Farms Accomplished What Slavery Could Not: Destroy Black Family!

Dr. Walter Williams: Welfare Has Broken up the Black Family: Welfare State Accomplished What Slavery Could Not: Destroy Black Family! (Fox)

Dr. Walter Williams says that welfare government programs have accomplished what slavery and Jim Crow laws could not do: destroy the black family. Williams points out that up until the 1940’s between 75-90% of all black children were being raised in two parent homes; which started changing immediately after Lyndon Johnson Implemented his ‘War on Poverty’ Nanny State. Today less than 33% of black children are raised in two parent homes. Williams points out that the illegitimacy rate amongst blacks was 18% in 1940 but ballooned to 72.5% in 2008. In his 1985 documentary Good Intentions; Williams suggests that government welfare programs, with their “good intentions” led America’s black families into Hell.

Destroying seeds of our future: SA's Welfare State of Moral Degeneration & Teenage Pregnancy & Educ. Mediocrity Tsunami

Destroying seeds of our future

We tolerate an education system that robs our children of opportunities, writes Mamphela Ramphele

Mar 5, 2011 11:42 PM
Mamphela Ramphele, Sunday Times

Successful societies focus on ensuring that future generations perform better than past and present ones. The crisis of underperformance of our education and training system lies at the heart of the growth of inequality, continuing poverty and dependence on welfare transfers.

We have descended into an unsustainable situation, with 15 million welfare grant recipients supported by six million taxpayers. The majority of these welfare transfers are child grants extended to those under the age of 18. Child grants amount to R35.6-billion - 16% of the social protection budget allocation, in 2011, of R146.9-billion.

Some analysts are warning that our society is being hit by a teenage pregnancy tsunami. The Times reported recently that, in Gauteng alone, 5000 schoolgirls are preparing to give birth in 2011. For every age cohort of 1.5 million starting school each year, just over 500000 end up sitting for final year examinations. Less than 70% of these candidates get a high school diploma - of which only 20% are good enough to give the pupil access to higher education.

‘Margaret Thatcher said whoever thinks that the ANC can rule South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo-land’ - Moeletsi Mbeki

MOELETSI MBEKI: Wealth creation

Only a matter of time before the hand grenade explodes

Business Day
Published: 2011/02/10 07:01:41 AM

AFRICAN VOICES OF WISDOM: [01] [02] [03] [04] [05] [06] [07] [08] [09] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34]

I can predict when South Africa’s “Tunisia Day” will arrive. Tunisia Day is when the masses rise against the powers that be, as happened recently in Tunisia. The year will be 2020, give or take a couple of years.

The year 2020 is when China estimates that its minerals-intensive industrialisation phase will be concluded.

For South Africa, this will mean the ANC government will have to cut back on social grants, which it uses to placate the black poor and to get their votes. China’s industrialisation phase has forced up the prices of South Africa’s minerals, which has enabled the government to finance social welfare programmes.

The ANC inherited a flawed, complex society it barely understood; its tinkerings with it are turning it into an explosive cocktail.

Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher once commented that whoever thought that the ANC could rule South Africa was living in cloud-cuckoo-land.

Why was she right? In 16 years of ANC rule, all the symptoms of a government out of its depth have grown worse:

• Life expectancy has slid from 65 to 53 since the ANC came to power.
  
  
• In 2007, South Africa became a net food importer for the first time.
  
  
• The elimination of agricultural subsidies led to a loss of 600 000 farmworkers’ jobs and the eviction from commercial farming of 2.4 million people between 1997 and 2007.
  
  
• The ANC stopped controlling the borders, leading to a flood of poor people into South Africa.

What should the ANC have done? When they took control of the government in 1994, ANC leaders should have identified South Africa’s strengths and weaknesses and decided how to use the strengths to minimise or rectify the weaknesses.

A wise government would have persuaded the skilled white and Indian population to devote some time – even an hour a week – to train blacks and coloureds.

Cape Coloureds & Elderly Blacks Miss Apartheid: Living Standards much better under apartheid; despite forced removals

The ANC is Not for US, Say Coloured Voters

Fadela Slamdien, All Africa
17 January 2011

Cape Town — Much has been said about the 'coloured vote' in the Western Cape being the ANC's Achilles heel. Being the one province in the country that does not have a majority black population - the ANC's traditional voter base - and the ANC's inability to woo coloured voters to provide them with an outright win has seen Cape Town swing between the DA and ANC until the DA gathered strength with the winning the province in 2009.

Not even Nelson Mandela's reign in the early days of democracy was able to grant the ANC an outright majority vote in the province. West Cape News hit the streets of Grassy Park in an effort to obtain insight into the mood ahead of upcoming local government elections.

Among the tens of coloured people canvassed during a day in Grassy Park, most elderly people said a lack of jobs and high levels of crime reflected badly on the ANC. Leaning toward the right, a number of people said their lifestyles were better under apartheid, despite the fact of forced removals.

"They should have left things as they were. Before, there was very little crime, the death penalty was in, and one could send your children to the shop at night. Everybody had jobs. People were given houses and not put out on the streets like now. In 1994," said a resident who did not want to be identified.

She said despite the Group Areas Act, the apartheid government provided for them. "People who were kicked out of Constantia were put in council flats. Look at the way people are living now. People are not put into flats. Now there is crime and drugs. Why vote for the ANC if all of this is happening?" she said.

Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City

Crazy Like a Fox: One Principal's Triumph in the Inner City; By Dr. Ben Chavis, Carey Blakely [*Amazon**Kalahari*]

I used to live in the Oakland ghetto, I was the only white woman stupid enough to do so, for the surrounding five blocks. At first my neighbours left me alone, cause they thought I was an undercover cop. After my neighbours got used to me, they asked me 'What's a white bitch doing living in the ghetto?" I said, "Saving up money to get the fuck out of here; whats a black nigger doing living in the ghetto?". Everyone was silent... While most of my neigbhours spent the little they earned on alcohol and drugs; I saved mine, and left the ghetto. They are still there. Luckily for the few who want their kids to get out of the Oakland ghetto, there is the tough love, straight talk express no excuses, no victim stories, just hard work and discipline, of Dr. Ben Chavis; whose book Crazy Like a Fox, begins like this:

Before I became principal, people called American Indian Public Charter School the zoo. … The students smoked cigarettes, fought, drank, and broke beer and liquor bottles on Magee Avenue, the road lining the school. There were old, dingy mattresses nearby where they had sex. A staff member allegedly sold drugs to the students, some of whom snuck into a tool shed on campus to smoke pot. Students threw water balloons off the roof and computers out the class windows.

Crazy Like the Fox is described as:

The inspiring true story of one man's determination to make a difference- and the school he changed forever.

"If you act like a winner, you'll be treated like a winner. If you act like a fool, you'll be treated like a fool."

This is the golden rule set forth by Dr. Ben Chavis, the highly unorthodox principal of Oakland, California's American Indian Public Charter School, which was hailed as an "education miracle" by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger after it was transformed from a failing "nuisance" into one of the best public middle schools in the nation.

This is the story of how one man, in daring to be different, effected such stunning change. With his rigorous, no-nonsense approach, Dr. Ben Chavis debunks the myth that poor, minority, inner-city schools have little chance at academic excellence. Focusing on back-to-basics ideals, he has created a structured educational model that, combined with the enthusiasm of his students and teachers, delivers astounding results.

Ending Slavery Blame-Game: Africas Black-on-Black Slavery-for-Profit Empire: The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa

Ending the Slavery Blame Game

By Henry Louis Gates Jr., New York Times
Published: April 22, 2010 | (Excerpts)

The Slave Market (1867), by Jean-Léon Gérôme (11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904): a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits and other subjects, bringing the Academic painting tradition to an artistic climax.

THANKS to an unlikely confluence of history and genetics — the fact that he is African-American and president — Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to reshape the debate over one of the most contentious issues of America’s racial legacy: reparations, the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage.

There are many thorny issues to resolve before we can arrive at a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime. Perhaps the most vexing is how to parcel out blame to those directly involved in the capture and sale of human beings for immense economic gain.

While we are all familiar with the role played by the United States and the European colonial powers like Britain, France, Holland, Portugal and Spain, there is very little discussion of the role Africans themselves played. And that role, it turns out, was a considerable one, especially for the slave-trading kingdoms of western and central Africa. These included the Akan of the kingdom of Asante in what is now Ghana, the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin), the Mbundu of Ndongo in modern Angola and the Kongo of today’s Congo, among several others.

For centuries, Europeans in Africa kept close to their military and trading posts on the coast. Exploration of the interior, home to the bulk of Africans sold into bondage at the height of the slave trade, came only during the colonial conquests, which is why Henry Morton Stanley’s pursuit of Dr. David Livingstone in 1871 made for such compelling press: he was going where no (white) man had gone before.

Slavery Secret: Africans sold Africans into Slavery.. Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on PBS: "Africans sold other Africans to the Europeans..... There were African middlemen and they'd fight wars with other Africans to enslave them and to sell them to the white man.... Slavery was a huge business for different African kingdoms..... The story that we got when we were kids...it's not how it happened..... Africans sold other Africans to the Europeans."

How did slaves make it to these coastal forts? The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.

Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.

Assassination of Quatro Detainee Sipho Phungulwa: Cherry on the Mandela Monarchy 'M Plan' Cake

A DEATH IN SOUTH AFRICA:

THE KILLING OF SIPHO PHUNGULWA


Paul Trewhela

1993-04-00: Searchlight South Africa,
Vol 3, No 2: 10 April 1993 pages 8 to 30

The Principle of Monarchy

The Mandela myth was mainly the creation of the South African Communist Party. As the most important organizer of ANC politics within the country and internationally for thirty years, especially through the media, the SACP in the late 1950s and early 1960s set about the creation of a very specific cult of personality.

The 'M Plan' of 1953, in which 'M' stood for Mandela, did more to surround the leader's name with a mystique than reorganize the ANC on a cell-system, as it was supposed to do. Ten years later, after the arrest of members of the High Command of Umkhonto we Sizwe at Lilliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, the emphasis was not principally on a collective call: Free the Rivonia nine.' The fate of an entire generation of political victims was absorbed into the fate of a single individual: Free Mandela.' Such personification of thousands of individual acts of imprisonment by the state might have been good media politics, but it was the negation of democratic accountability. It represented the introduction of the monarchical principle as a staple into modern South African political life. More urgently, it was a trivializing of politics which took the issue away from matters of substance and concentrated attention on the persona of one man.

It is now clear that Mandela's last three years in prison were a secret cloister of discussions, cultivated by the state, in which the Olympian remoteness of the regime was imparted to the politics of its leading opponent. In essence the fate of the whole society devolved in isolation upon the judgement of one man, whom prison appeared not so much to exclude from the people as it served to exclude the people from the secret deliberations between this one man and the state. This was a spectacle, in which a single individual cast a shadow on a vast audience through his non-presence.

And thus we come to Caesar's wife. As the decades of Mandela's imprisonment went by, the mystique of royalty, the principle of divine right, passed by law of succession to his wife, who became the representative of the idea of the sacral on the earth of township politics. In so far as Mandela in prison was mystically always present through his absence, Mrs Mandela as consort played a very material Empress Theodora, or perhaps Lady Macbeth. The more the myth grew through Mandela's unworldly situation in prison—alive, yet dead to human contact, the unseen mover in the power play of southern African politics—the more an extraordinary status attached to his wife.

Excerpts: Mbokodo: Inside MK: Mwezi Twala - A Soldier's Story, by Mwezi Twala

Mbokodo: Inside MK: Mwezi Twala - A Soldier's Story, by Ed Bernard and Mwezi Twala [*Amazon*]

Further below are excerpts from Mwezi Twala's book: Mbokodo: Inside MK: Mwezi Twala - A Soldier's Story. Herewith two preface perspectives:

In Women in the ANC and SWAPO: sexual abuse of young women in the ANC camps, by Olefile Samuel Mngqibisa, October 1993, Searchlight South Africa, No 11, Pages 11-16 (PDF); Olefile Samuel Mngqibisa, a former soldier in the ANC's Umkhonto we Sizwe, describes the education of an Mbokodo officer in a poem which he presented to the Commission of Inquiry into human rights abuses in ANC detention camps, chaired by Mr Sam Motsuenyane.

Give a young boy — 16 years old — from the ghetto of Soweto, an
opportunity to drive a car for the first time in his life.
This boy is from a poor working class family.
Give him money to buy any type of liquor and good, expensive clothes.
This boy left South Africa during the Soweto schools uprising in 1976.
He doesn't know what is an employer.
He never tasted employer-exploitation.
Give him the right to sleep with all these women.
Give him the opportunity to study in Party Schools and well-off
military academies in Eastern Europe.
Teach him Marxism-Leninism and tell him to defend the revolution
against counter-revolutionaries.
Send him to the Stasi to train him to extract information by force from
enemy agents. He turns to be a torturer and executioner by firing
squad.
All these are the luxuries and the dream-come-true he never thought
of for his lifetime...
This Security becomes the law unto itself.

In Mbokodo: Inside MK: Mwezi Twala - A Soldier's Story, Mwezi Twala writes:

Viva Barbarism.. The ANC's Long Walk to -- 'liberation before education comradeship' -- Freedom from responsibility continues...

Have we descended below worst kind of barbarism?

Aug 19, 2010, Sowetan
Flipside of Life, with Charles Mogale

LET'S get serious, for once. Last week South Africans saw the very worst possible savage barbarism visited on a couple of young women on the East Rand.

Long story short: the women took up jobs vacated by people who had been fired for going on an illegal strike at the OR Tambo International Airport.

They were apparently ambushed and caught by a bunch of yahoos on a train, stripped starkers and their clothes thrown out of the window.

Someone with a phone camera snapped away and the pictures ended up on the front page of a tabloid.

Now savagery does not go beyond that. The pity of it all is that if our past record is anything to go by, the perpetrators will never be arrested, let alone have their day in court and be convicted.

‘Blacks Must Have Black Rule Even If They Don’t Want It!’.....

Transferred to: TYGAE: SQSwans: Gedaliah Braun: Racism, Guilt, Self-Hatred and Self Deceipt: A Philosophers Hard Headed Look at the Dark Continent.

Nigerian agrees with DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners

One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.

James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary.

Welfare State Population Explosion gives rise to Xenophobic violence

Welfare state gives rise to xenophobic violence

Meshack Mabogoane, Business Day
Published: 2010/07/14 07:38:35 AM

THE recent rumours about potential xenophobic violence after the World Cup are a puzzling throwback to a third force that bedevilled the 1980s at the height of opposition to apartheid. The evil has reared its head and smacks, as before, of central levers at work. It also raises questions about the role of security agencies and their part in preventing crime and safeguarding law and order.

Fears of xenophobic attacks are totally unnecessary. The National Intelligence Agency (NIA), police and army must handle delinquency and serious threats to state security — whether they are suspicions, rumours or reality. Any large-scale violence, including xenophobic violence, is their business and they should pre-emptively and promptly deal with any menace.

The head of the police service has already congratulated his troops for victory during the Fifa tournament — much crime was anticipated before the tournament, based on the influx of foreigners and internal experiences.

If the police succeeded at this task, surely they can repeat the feat by pre- empting xenophobic crimes. Stories of potential xenophobic threats follow previous attacks in 2008. While the fires from those attacks were still hot, the state hastily gave explanations and solutions.

The African National Congress (ANC) made xenophobia a “moral” issue, eschewing interpretations that it was based on material causes, such as jobs and housing, which ignite poor and stressed communities anywhere. No mention was made of the ethnic factor, as happens in conflicts, for example, in Nigeria, in the Balkans, and in SA’s history — among native blacks, white burgers and foreigners.

Most unusually, former President Thabo Mbeki interrupted his globetrotting escapades to address the social issue. He held meetings with victims — yet casualties of HIV/AIDS, whose existence and death were denied, still got no attention. Practical results ensued quickly: the speedy issuing of identity documents to foreigners — ready for elections and readier for social grants and citizenship.

With Fifa gone, a huge propaganda vacuum exists which, naturally, must be filled. So xenophobia presents a logical sequel to an international spectacular. Now SA must show it “cares” for foreigners and, because of “impending attacks”, strong official exhortations are made to welcome and integrate them — regardless of deteriorating social, economic and health facilities that are reeling under the weight of an exploding population.

Again, the NIA is facing allegations of an inability to detect xenophobic threats, outdone by ordinary people, including priests who have questionably intervened on security issues affecting foreigners.

Black Zimbabweans say life was better under White Rhodesian Goverment...

Black Zimbabweans say life was better under White Rhodesian Goverment...

Postcard From Zimbabwe

By Nicholas D. Kristof
Published: April 7, 2010, New York Times

HWANGE, Zimbabwe: Here’s a measure of how President Robert Mugabe is destroying this once lush nation of Zimbabwe:

In a week of surreptitious reporting here (committing journalism can be a criminal offense in Zimbabwe), ordinary people said time and again that life had been better under the old, racist, white regime of what was then called Rhodesia.

“When the country changed from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, we were very excited,” one man, Kizita, told me in a village of mud-walled huts near this town in western Zimbabwe. “But we didn’t realize the ones we chased away were better and the ones we put in power would oppress us.”

“It would have been better if whites had continued to rule because the money would have continued to come,” added a neighbor, a 58-year-old farmer named Isaac. “It was better under Rhodesia. Then we could get jobs. Things were cheaper in stores. Now we have no money, no food.”

Over and over, I cringed as I heard Africans wax nostalgic about a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite. Black Zimbabweans responded that at least that regime was more competent than today’s nasty, oppressive regime run by the tiny black elite that surrounds Mr. Mugabe.

African Lawyer: African Population Explosion of unemployment, poverty, hunger & squatters is a Timebomb....

Population explosion: Africa is sitting on a time bomb

African lawyer agrees “High rates of population growth create unemployment faster than jobs, increase the mouths to be fed faster than the production of rice paddies, squatters faster than people housed in modern facilities, excrement faster than sewers can be built.”

Wednesday, 31st March, 2010
By Peter Mulira, The New Vision, Uganda

WITH the population of Africa predicted to double within the next 30 years, the economic future of its people is set to be very bleak unless something is done to combat the uncontrolled growth rate.

Africa’s fertility rate has been on the increase in recent years out of pace with the continent’s ability to feed the new mouths or to put in place the physical and social services that will ensure a reasonable quality of life for the people. In order to tackle this problem the time has come to seek new avenues through which the message will reach the villages that unless the present generation reduces its reproductive propensity tomorrow’s children will face a very bleak future.

According to the Population Reference Bureau (2001) the estimated population of Africa in 2001 was 810 million people. This suggests an increase of 733 million people in the 501 years between 1500 and 2001 an average of 1.46 million people per year or 0.45% annual growth rate.

However, between 2000 and 2001 alone the African population increased by 20 million or 2.4% in spite of the scourge of HIV/AIDS! Earlier between 1975 and 2001 the population doubled from 402 to 820 million people. Thus while African population growth rates were low in the past the rates have gone up considerably during the last 20 years.