The US-backed coup in Bolivia

Bill Van Auken

Bolivia, South America’s most impoverished nation, teeters on the brink of a civil war in the wake of a US-backed coup that led to the resignation Sunday of President Evo Morales, Vice President Álvaro García Linera and various ministers, state governors and government officials.

While Morales, García Linera and others have fled the country for asylum in Mexico, the Bolivian workers, peasants and indigenous majority that they purported to represent have been left behind to confront heavily armed troops and fascist gangs in the streets.

The bitter lesson that the Latin American working class can advance its interests not by means of “left” bourgeois nationalist regimes, but only through its own independent revolutionary struggle, is once again being written in blood.

Police block supporters of former President Evo Morales from entering the area of Congress in La Paz, Bolivia, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2019. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Thousands of workers and youth have responded with courageous resistance to the coup, taking to the streets of La Paz and the neighboring working-class district of El Alto, where they burned down police stations and confronted security forces. Elsewhere, miners and peasants have blocked highways, and anti-coup protesters have confronted heavily armed troops firing live ammunition and tear gas grenades. In Cochabamba, the military brought in a helicopter to fire on crowds. The toll of dead and wounded has steadily risen.

The military-police violence has been accompanied by a reign of terror by the fascistic opponents of Morales, who have burned down homes of those linked to the government, kidnapped family members of officials and carried out violent assaults against those linked to Morales’s Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, as well as targeting indigenous people, especially women, for attacks. Headquarters of social organizations have been attacked, and radio stations invaded and taken off the air.

After three weeks of protests over the disputed October 20 presidential election, the coup was consummated Sunday with a televised address by Gen. Williams Kaliman, the chief of the armed forces, surrounded by the entire military command, in which they “suggested” that “the president resign his presidential mandate and allow the pacification and reestablishment of stability for the good of Bolivia.”

Morales and García Linera took the “suggestion,” saying that they were doing so to “avoid bloodshed” and “guarantee peace.” If that was their objective, their capitulation to the military and the Bolivian right has failed miserably.

US President Donald Trump celebrated the overthrow of Morales as a “significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere,” warning that Venezuela and Nicaragua are next.

But it wasn’t only Trump. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post published editorials Tuesday supporting the coup and suggesting that it was a blow for “democracy,” and that the role of the military in forcing Morales out was merely incidental.

This reflects the fundamental continuity in Washington’s imperialist policy in Latin America under Democrats and Republicans alike, from the abortive 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela under George W. Bush (prematurely celebrated by the Times), to the 2009 US-backed overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras under Barack Obama, to today’s ouster of Morales under Trump.

Underlying this continuity is the drive by US imperialism to reverse the decline of its global economic hegemony by means of military force and violence, particularly in the region that it has so long regarded as its “own backyard.” This is driven both by the desire of US transnationals to lay unfettered claim on Latin America’s resources and markets—not least Bolivia’s vast energy and mineral reserves, including 70 percent of the world’s lithium—and by the strategic confrontation between US imperialism and China, whose trade with the region rose to $306 billon last year.

Morales’s government was part of the so-called “Pink Tide” of left-posturing bourgeois nationalist governments that came to power in Latin America, beginning with that of Hugo Chavez in 1998.

Like Chavez, Morales declared himself an adherent of the “Bolivarian Revolution” and socialism. He and the MAS were swept into office on the wave of revolutionary upheavals that shook Bolivia and brought down successive governments during the so-called water and gas “wars”—against water privatization and for the nationalization of gas—between 2000 and 2005.

The leader of the coca growers’ union and the first Bolivian president from the country’s long-oppressed indigenous population, Morales won broad popular support for a government that served as the vehicle for containing the revolutionary struggles of the Bolivian masses.

This government, however, soon allowed that its aim was not really socialism, but rather “Andean-Amazonian capitalism,” which consisted of “nationalizations” that imposed new taxes on transnational corporations that were guaranteed even greater access to the exploitation of Bolivia’s gas and other natural resources.

In addition to its alliance with transnational capital, the Morales government cemented a pact with the agricultural oligarchy. Both were granted rights to exploit lands that had previously been declared national parks to protect their indigenous populations.

The government also relied upon what it described as the “military-peasant alliance,” through which it sought to solidify support in the military command by offering it control over sections of the economy, resources for creating its own businesses and generous benefits. It created an “Anti-imperialist Military School” and had soldiers salute their officers with the Guevarist slogan of “Hasta la victoria siempre.” In the end, the bourgeois army, which Morales never disbanded, proved loyal to its roots in the fascist-military dictatorships of Generals Hugo Banzer and Luis García Meza and the national security state doctrine of the Pentagon’s School of the Americas.

The right-wing policies of the Morales government led to continuous confrontations with the working class and peasantry and steadily eroded its support. Its right-wing opponents in Bolivia’s traditional ruling oligarchy were able to exploit Morales’s attempt to secure himself another term as president—in violation of the constitution and the results of a 2016 referendum—to win a popular base for its counterrevolutionary objectives.

Morales and the MAS leadership bear criminal responsibility for the coup which they condemn. Its principal victims will be not Morales and his fellow politicians, but the masses of Bolivian workers, peasants and oppressed.

Also sharing blame for the acute dangers now confronting the masses of workers and oppressed in Bolivia are the various pseudo-left groups that promoted the Bolivarian revolutionary pretensions of the Morales government and demanded that the working class subordinate itself to the leadership of the bourgeois nationalists. Chief among them are various revisionist tendencies that split from the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), rejecting its struggle for the international unity and political independence of the working class based upon a revolutionary socialist program in order to adapt themselves to Stalinism and various forms of bourgeois nationalism, chief among them, Castroism.

The period in which these parties have been able to help suppress the class struggle is coming to an end, not only in Latin America, but internationally. The events in Bolivia, along with the mass uprisings of workers and youth in Chile and elsewhere on the Latin American continent, are demonstrating that the ruling class is no longer able to rule in the old way, and it has become impossible for the working class to live in the old way, creating the conditions for a new period of revolutionary upheavals.

The most urgent political task is the formation of a new revolutionary leadership in the working class based on an assimilation of the long struggle of Trotskyism against revisionism. This means building sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International throughout Latin America.

Tens of thousands in Russia face medicine shortages as a result of Western sanctions

David Levine

The past years have seen an increasingly severe shortage of medicine in Russia, especially for the treatment of cancer and other life-threatening conditions. Russians requiring treatment have been compelled to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to Moscow to obtain treatment because the medicines they need are unavailable in their regions.

The main reason for these shortages has been the combined effect of economic sanctions imposed by Western imperialist governments since 2014 as well as the Russian government’s reactive policies of import substitution. The financial sanctions imposed by the United States, affecting financial operations between the two countries, have had practical effects on the availability of medicines in Russia.

Contrary to official propaganda in the Western mainstream press, which highlights sanctions targeting individuals around Putin, these sanctions are harming Russian workers and their children first and foremost. The growing shortages in medicine are a particularly stark demonstration of this fact. Since wealthy Russians have opportunities to travel outside of Russia for medical treatment, the primary victims of the sanctions consist of the poor, the disabled, and the working class as a whole.

The last few months have seen a series of scandals over the arrest of mothers in Russia for trying to get hold of unregistered medicine for their sick children.

Between April and August 2019, two women from Moscow and one from Yekaterinburg were temporarily arrested and charged for illegally obtaining unregistered medicine. In April, Darya Belyayeva of Yekaterinburg came under criminal prosecution for buying online an antidepressant called Elontril for her child. In July, Yelena Bogolyubova of Moscow was also arrested for purchasing online medications that were to be delivered to her by mail. After the incident received substantial public attention, she was released without charges. A Moscow woman who chose to remain unnamed likewise came under criminal charges in August for obtaining a medicine called Frisium, also for her epileptic child. The charges were once again dropped after several days. At least 3,000 children in Russia are estimated to be currently in need of Frisium treatment.

Last year, in June 2018, Yekaterina Konnova of Moscow had come under criminal prosecution for buying online diazepam rectal solution for her child, who suffers from both cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and then reselling some of the leftover surplus to the parents of other children with epilepsy. The charges were eventually dropped. At least 3,000 children in Russia are estimated to be currently in need of Frisium treatment.

The public outcry over these arrests and charges compelled the minister of health, Veronika Skvortsova, to announce the free distribution of Frisium—still lacking official government registration—to 540 children whose parents had made applications to the government. The Russian government is also reviewing a bill which would grant free medication for critical conditions, including heart failure, and the ministry of health has also announced plans to distribute unregistered forms of diazepam, midazolam, and phenobarbital this month.

However, regardless of these limited measures, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of adults who suffer from these same conditions, as well as countless children and adults who need medicines which have yet to come under any such exceptional policies, will remain without legal means of obtaining the needed treatments in Russia.

The Russian first deputy minister of industry and trade, Sergey Tsyb, told Deutsche Welle in November 2018, “They [the West] try to reassure us by saying that there has been no historical precedent for an embargo of medicine, but I have clarified that there has been an embargo [against Russia] in a number of countries, at least in an indirect way. That is, yes, they don’t directly prohibit companies from selling medicines [to Russia], but the economic chain has been paralyzed, as a result of which producers have been afraid or deprived of the possibility of selling pharmaceuticals to countries affected by sanctions.”

The effect of the sanctions has been compounded by the desperate efforts of the Kremlin to accommodate the sanctions regime by a nationalist program of import substitution. Products previously imported from abroad are to be replaced by products produced in Russia and its allies in the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), which includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

One of the Russian bans on foreign imports has resulted in preventing government agencies from purchasing medicines from producers outside the EAEU in all cases where there are at least two bids from EAEU-based companies. In 2017, this led to the withdrawal from the Russian market of Medac, the primary world producer of asparaginase, which is used to treat acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukemia, (AML) and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

In an interview with Novaya Gazeta dated October 30, 2019 , Aleksey Maschan, Director of the Institute of Hematology, Immunology, and Cell Technologies at the Dmitry Rogachev National Medical Research Center, warned that thousands of children and adults will die of curable cancers if the government’s import substitution policies affecting chemotherapy drugs are not changed soon.

Maschan told the newspaper that, cytarabine, also used for the treatment of ALL, AML, chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is currently available in Russia only because foreign exporters have volunteered to sell it to Russia at a loss.

According to the liberal Novaya Gazeta, Oncaspar, which serves as an alternative to asparaginase for the treatment of ALL and certain lymphomas, has recently disappeared entirely from the Russian market. There are approximately 2000 cases of ALL in Russia each year, most of which are children. The charity Podari zhizn’ has been importing Oncaspar for use in large federal clinics, but the drug has become unavailable in many Russian regions.

Charities such as Podari zhizn’ continue to import medicines to Russia at the expense of private donors. However, such stopgap and patchwork measures are entirely inadequate to serve the needs of the entire population, which exceeds 140 million.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has a Model List of Essential Medicines, which includes a “core list,” consisting of “minimum medicine needs for a basic health-care system, listing the most efficacious, safe and cost–effective medicines for priority conditions.” Some of the medications on the core list are not regularly available in Russia because they have not been registered. This includes diazepam rectal solution, commonly used to treat epilepsy in children. Because it has not been registered with the Russian government, it therefore cannot be legally bought or sold in Russia, regardless of doctors’ prescriptions.

According to the Dom s mayakom (“Lighthouse”) youth hospice and the Vera (“Faith”) hospice support fund, at least 23,000 Russian children are in need of diazepam and similar medications. In an open letter they addressed to Russian President Vladimir Putin in August 2018, they noted, “The absence of medicines or their pediatric forms for the treatment of pain and convulsions causes children to suffer, superfluous calls to emergency medical teams, superfluous intensive care unit hospitalizations, and child deaths resulting from untimely medical treatment (in the case of a seizure lasting over five minutes, the medicine must be administered urgently).”

US-backed Colombian military kills eight children in bombing, attempts cover-up

Andrea Lobo

The Colombian defense minister, Guillermo Botero, resigned after the release of a report indicating eight children were killed in a bombing in the southern department of Caquetá, whose execution and cover-up implicate President Iván Duque as well as the Colombian military and its main ally and sponsor, the Pentagon.

Seven other bodies were found, several “so mangled that technical analyses could only determine they were younger than 20,” as described by Senator Roy Barreras of the right-wing Social Party of National Unity, who made the reports public.

Botero had lied to Congress in September that “14 delinquents” had been killed by the bombing, which was carried out on August 29 against a dissident faction of the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) that had announced hours earlier it had taken up arms again.

Duque himself said the following day, “Last night, I authorized the Special Operations Joint Command (CCOES) to carry out an offensive operation,” which he described as “strategic, meticulous, impeccable and rigorous, killing ‘Gildardo Lucho,’ leader of the organization.”

According to an international criminal law expert from the Grenada University in Spain, Anibal García, contacted by the Anadolu Agency, “Especially since he has a military body with its own dimensions to verify such situations, an alleged war crime would have been perpetrated.” Opposition senators in Colombia have proposed requesting an investigation by the International Criminal Court on Duque’s role.

However, beyond its “own” capacity, as indicated by the Joint Special Operations Command (CCOES) chief Major General Jorge Arturo Salgado in the latest edition of the military journal Dialogue, “With the US, we have a daily and personal relationship. We have a permanent and constant relationship with the special forces of the US Army in every component of capacity, since we have their men within our organizations, who accompany us in every process, from doctrine, organization, training, personnel, sustainability and logistics.”

And beyond the capacity to “verify,” a municipal official at Caquetá, Herner Evelio Carreño, had warned in letters dated June 20, June 23, July 23 and August 26 that the guerrillas were “forcibly recruiting our children, girls and adolescents.” TeleSur confirmed subsequently with the parents of two of the victims, 12-year-old Ángela Gaitán and 16-year-old Diana Medina, that they had been forcibly recruited.

Amid the wave of mass protests sweeping Ecuador, Chile and the region, the response of the Colombian ruling class to the revelations has been marked by authoritarian threats and alarm, while Washington has remained silent. In recent months, strikes by teachers, transportation workers and others and mass student and indigenous demonstrations have been on the rise in Colombia.

The Caquetá revelations have increased calls for Duque’s resignation, which has become the main demand in a national strike announced for November 21, which the trade union confederations and the pseudo-left coalition Democratic Alternative Pole (PDA) hope to use to dissipate social anger against Duque’s austerity.

A national teachers’ strike in September and other demonstrations have condemned the killing of hundreds of social activists and other civilians by the state and paramilitary forces since the September 2016 “peace” accord with the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

In another warning, the weekly Semana wrote that November 21 could become a “transcendental date” since “one can’t discard the contagious effect” from Chile and Ecuador, adding, “There has not been a national strike in many years in the country.”

According to the Press Freedom Foundation (FLIP), when a journalist first asked Duque about the revelations on Wednesday “the president appeared to panic” and his guards beat up the reporter.

Afterward, Duque sought to bury the issue, praising Botero on Thursday for “serving with so much willingness and patriotism that he won respect and fondness,” and blaming the incident on “terrorist groups who use minors as human shields.” The new acting minister, Gen. Luis Fernando Navarro then claimed, “We didn’t know that there were minors in the camp.”

By Saturday, Duque moved to openly threaten the growing opposition, indicating, “unfortunately a series of lies is being used to convoke a strike that has lots of risks and whose examples are Chile and Ecuador,” where states of emergency were enforced through deadly military force.

Duque’s statement came amid growing calls for censorship from the ruling elite. An editorial that day in the “liberal” El Espectador denounced Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for having an “ambivalent attitude” toward censorship of “fake news.” The editorial Friday applauded the resignation of Botero, while warning that the military’s “messages are not calming the country” and demanding that “the confidence be rebuilt between the Armed Forces and Colombians.”

This is a central concern for US imperialism, which has turned Colombia into its spearhead for economic and military pressure in the regime change operation against the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, especially since the failure of efforts to instigate factions of the Venezuelan military to oust Maduro and install a US puppet regime.

Business Insider indicated late last month that the US has been pressuring Colombia to buy 15 of the latest F-16 warplanes, but “budgetary restrictions and a lack of public support for major defense expenditures also make that purchase less likely.” The Caquetá revelations have only increased popular opposition to militarism.

For over a century, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have threatened and carried out military invasions and coups to impose US diktats through military regimes. The brazenness of military repression in Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Honduras and elsewhere to defend the highest levels of inequality in the world is the result of this entire period of imperialist oppression and looting.

In 1965, the year the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson intensified the US war in Vietnam and began a murderous US military occupation of the Dominican Republic, the Department of Defense wrote in a strategic document, that “in order to protect the sovereignty of their nations [the militaries must be ready] to remove government leaders from office whenever, in the judgement of the military, the conduct of these leaders is injurious to the welfare of the nation.”

At the time, the US military was training and directly controlling armies and death squads across the region, which were killing thousands. In Colombia, US diplomatic cables between 1959 and 1965 describe in detail the formation of “hunter/killer teams” against radicalized workers, youth and peasants.

“The [Colombian] Army has seemed to accent the death, rather than the often useless capture of violence leaders … whatever the long-term effect these bandit deaths will have on the Colombian violence situation, certainly these deaths have boosted the morale of the army,” indicates a US embassy cable from July 7, 1961.

The long-term effect was the longest armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere in which the vast majority of the 267,000 killed and 7 million displaced were civilians. In August 1997, Washington labeled the FARC and ELN Colombian guerrillas “foreign terrorist organizations” and shortly after launched Plan Colombia, which has injected over $10 billion into Colombia’s military forces. In 2009, William Brownfield, then Obama’s ambassador to Colombia, described it as “the most successful nation-building exercise that the United States has associated itself with perhaps in the last 25-30 years.”

According to the US Congressional Research Service, the 2019 budget request for aid to Colombia “would reduce post-conflict recovery programs and place greater emphasis on counternarcotics and security.”

Steel layoffs in US mount due to falling production and trade war

Samuel Davidson

Growing layoffs at major steel producers in the United States over the past three months point to a further slowdown in manufacturing and the impact of Trump’s trade war measures. All the major steel producers in the US have reduced production this year and this is now translating into a series of job cuts.

United States Steel (USS), the second largest steel producer in the US and once the symbol of US domination of industrial production, is facing a major crisis. The company’s stock has lost over 75 percent of its value since reaching a high of $45 per share in February 2018 when the Trump administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on steel imports. Today USS stock is trading at less than $11.

The company has announced that it will idle its tin mill in East Chicago, Indiana. The company claims that half of the 297 workers being laid off will be transferred to its other northwest Indiana steel mills, the Gary Works and the Midwest Plant in Portage. It gave no date for reopening the mill and most industry analysts expect it to permanently close because of falling demand for tin.

Earlier this year, USS shut down one of its blast furnaces at its Great Lakes Works near Detroit. Fifty workers were laid off at the time and another 200 lost their jobs at the end of September.

US Steel recently announced plans to buy a minority stake in Big River Steel for $700 million with the option to buy the rest of Arkansas-based steelmaker over the next four years. The buyout is part of USS’s cost-cutting measures. Big River uses an electric arc furnace to melt scrap metal instead of a blast furnace that produces new steel from iron ore.

Blast furnaces need to run at near peak capacity in order to be profitable while electric arc furnaces in so-called “mini-mills” can remain profitable at lower capacities. US Steel is also building new electric arc furnaces, but the decision to buy a competitor signals that the company needs to get into that market faster.

US Steel is not the only steelmaker slashing jobs. AK Steel has announced the closing of its mill in Ashland, Kentucky by the end of the year throwing all 260 employees out of work.

Earlier this year, TMK Ipsco Tubulars Inc. announced it was laying off 159 workers at its tubular plant in Wilder, Kentucky due to dropping demand from the oil and gas industry. Only 20 workers will remain, mainly for maintenance at the plant.

NLMK steel in Farrell, Pennsylvania laid off 100 workers over the summer citing the higher costs of steel imports. NLMK imported steel slabs from Russia and rolled them into finished products. The layoffs took place in the hot mill. About 300 workers are still working in other sections of the mill.

Last month, United Structures of America closed its plant in Portland, Tennessee, putting 45 employees out of work. The company blamed the layoffs on falling demand for steel from the construction industry.

Barber Steel Foundry in Rothbury, Michigan is closing this month, laying off all 61 employees. The foundry is part of Pittsburgh-based Wabtec Corporation, which manufactures locomotives and freight cars. Wabtec (Westinghouse Air Brakes Technology Corporation), which merged with GE Transportation, provoked a strike by 1,700 locomotive workers in Erie, Pennsylvania earlier this year that was isolated and betrayed by the United Electrical (UE) union.

Bayou Steel in Louisiana filed for bankruptcy October 1 and announced it was closing, putting 367 people out of work. Another 72 workers at its Harriman, Tennessee operations were also laid off. Bayou executives said they only had $50,000 in cash and were unable to secure credit.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Nucor Corporation, the largest steelmaker in the United States, and Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal, the largest steelmaker in the world, have both seen their stocks fall drastically this year and are under pressure to cut costs and jobs.

Nucor, which is also the largest mini mill operator, has seen its share value fall by nearly 25 percent since its high in 2018. ArcelorMittal’s stock has fallen nearly 60 percent, from a high of $36 in January 2018 to just $15.00. Like US Steel, ArcelorMittal relies primarily on blast furnaces to produce steel from iron ore.

During his election campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would revive the steel industry through trade war measures primarily aimed at imports from China and Europe. The expectation of the tariffs and the tariffs themselves sent stock prices up in anticipation of huge profits. However, the protectionist measures have had the opposite effect.

US Steel, Nucor and ArcelorMittal all brought additional capacity online in anticipation of greater demand. While demand rose modestly, the additional capacity put online quickly led to a crisis of overproduction in the US market and falling steel prices. While there is a vast need for steel to repair and improve the infrastructure in the US and around the world, under the capitalist system of production for profit and the division of the world into rival nation-states workers now face the irrational prospect of being thrown into poverty because they have produced “too much” steel.

While most analyses point to tariffs as the cause of the crisis for steel producers, the general slowdown in production in the US and world economy is a major factor. US manufacturing has declined for the past three months while world demand is also down.

China’s growth rate has fallen to 6 percent and the country is not importing as much steel as it did. Manufacturing in Europe has also been falling, which means they both import less steel and have more steel for export.

The United Steelworkers union which covers a shrinking but still substantial portion of steelworkers is working with the steel companies and the Trump administration to prevent steelworkers from launching a fight against the destruction of jobs and living standards.

In an effort to divert anger away from the corporations, the USW is once again promoting the poison of national chauvinism and militarism. It is the greatest cheerleader for Trump’s trade war measures and seeks to pit steelworkers in the US against their class brothers and sisters in Asia, Europe and South America and line up workers for a catastrophic war.

At the same time, the USW has deliberately isolated every struggle of workers in the United States and throughout the world against attacks on workers and social inequality.

Last year, the USW blocked strikes at both US Steel and ArcelorMittal despite overwhelming votes by its members for strike action. Currently, the USW is isolating the month-long strike by 2,000 copper miners in Arizona and New Mexico against one of the world’s largest copper conglomerates, Grupo Mexico.

The Socialist Equality Party urges steelworkers to form rank-and-file factory committees to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the USW, which is nothing but a tool of corporate management and the government. These committees should reach out to autoworkers, copper miners, teachers and other sections of workers to prepare a common counter-offensive against the corporate and financial elite.

The industrial mobilization of the working class must be combined with a new political strategy in opposition to both big-business parties and based on the international unity of the working class and the fight for socialism. The only way to oppose the relentless job- and wage-cutting demands of the transnational corporations is to unite the entire working class to transform the steel industry into a public enterprise under the democratic control and collective ownership of the working class.

Eleven thousand scientists warn of climate emergency

Daniel de Vries

“Scientists have a moral obligation to clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat and ‘tell it like it is.’ We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” a remarkable paper published last week in the scientific journal BioScience began.

The assertion of a planetary emergency, endorsed by scientists in 153 countries, came on the anniversary of the first official government-sponsored international climate change conference in 1979 in Geneva, Switzerland. “Despite 40 years of global climate negotiations,” the paper noted, “with few exceptions, we have generally conducted business as usual and have largely failed to address this predicament.”

“The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected,” the report warned. “It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity.”

“Especially worrisome, are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hothouse Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans. These climate chain reactions could cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable.”

This is far from the first time scientists have warned of the dangers of climate change. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which emerged from the process begun in Geneva, has issued five comprehensive global assessments documenting severe impacts already occurring and projections of potentially catastrophic ones to come.

The latest warning was championed by lead author Bill Ripple, an ecologist at Oregon State University, and collaborators from the University of Sydney, University of Cape Town and Tufts University, under the auspices of the newly formed Alliance of World Scientists.

Its language and urgency are a significant departure from previous assessments. It marks the first time broad sections of scientists have endorsed a straightforward declaration of emergency, moving beyond the sometimes cautious language and emphasis on characterizing uncertainty in previous discourse.

The shift is reflection of the growing disconnect between the scientific understanding of the consequences of climate change and a political and economic system proving itself unwilling and unable to address it. A wide consensus of scientists has concluded not only that climate change is real, but that the world is on a path towards catastrophe. At this point, nothing short of “transformative change” will do.

After decades of negotiations, the international response to the climate crisis has failed to go beyond the series of voluntary pledges memorialized in the Paris Agreement of 2015, which, even if achieved, would fail to avert a planetary disaster. Yet even these voluntary targets from Paris went too far for the leaders of the world’s largest economy. A day before the emergency declaration of scientists, the Trump administration formally announced its withdrawal from the Paris accords.

The BioScience paper identifies metrics, utilizing data over the past 40 years, that are intended to clearly communicate the interaction between humanity and climate change. These metrics go beyond traditional emphasis on rising surface temperatures, tracking in addition the worrying trends in extreme weather, land use changes, wildfire burn area, ocean heat content and chemistry changes, along with population and economic indicators.

The authors outline several areas for immediate action, including a rapid shift to renewable energy, protection of the earth’s ecosystems, prioritizing economic equality over growth, and addressing population growth through comprehensive access to family planning services and universal primary and secondary education.

As the past 40 years has demonstrated, no amount of warning, however dire, will be enough to implement these changes, even in the face of impending disaster, without a struggle to overturn the capitalist economic and social basis upon which all the key decisions are made.

UK workers see 2 pence an hour average wage increase, while pay of richest skyrockets

Margot Miller

As the UK faces uncharted waters post-Brexit, the outlook for millions who constitute the working poor is looking bleak. Two recent reports reveal growing wage inequality and evidence that unemployment rates have been grossly underestimated.

A Trades Union Congress (TUC) analysis of the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) annual survey of hours and earnings (covering April 2018-2019), reveals the wages of the less well-off are slipping further behind those who earn £50,000 and above.

While people in the highest 1 percent income bracket saw their pay rise by 7.6 percent between 2016 and 2018, average workers lagged far behind, seeing an increase of just 2 pence, or just 0.1 percent in the same period. This translates to an increase from £58.73 an hour to £63.18 for the top income earners, compared to a miserable increase from £12.71 to £12.73 an hour for those on average pay.

It is the lower end of the higher rate taxpayers—who are gaining the most by way of increases in pay—that Conservative leader Boris Johnson has singled out for tax cuts. Currently, the tax rate is 40 percent for income earners between £50,000 to £150,000, rising to 45 percent for those above £150,000. The Tories propose that those on £50,000 to £80,000 will be lifted out of the 40 percent bracket. Instead, they would pay the same 20 percent tax rate as those earning £12,501 to £50,000.

Johnson’s agenda is no less than completing the “Thatcher revolution” of privatization, deregulation and the destruction of wages and conditions of the working class, in order to increase the competitiveness of British capital under conditions of intensifying trade war. Former Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, beloved by the rich but universally hated by the working class, set in motion her government’s intention to dismantle the welfare state and “roll back the frontiers of socialism.”

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that such tax cuts would put an extra £2,500 a year into the pockets of the top 10 percent, taking money away from the National Health Service and Social Care. The IFS calculate a shortfall to the treasury of £9.6 billion a year would result from Johnson’s tax breaks for the richest.

The NHS and other vitally needed public services are teetering on the brink of collapse due to endless budget cuts since austerity was implemented in 2008 by the Brown government and continued by successive Tory governments—in order to bail out the banks and billionaires. As services no longer become available—the NHS no longer performs minor procedures such as operations for varicose veins while affordable care homes for the elderly are nonexistent—the working class can ill afford to access alternative services privately.

The Resolution Foundation (RF), a think tank which states its mission is to advise on ways to improve the standard of living of low- to middle-income earners, said Johnson’s tax plans would put an extra £3,000 a year in the pocket of someone on an annual salary of £80,000 a year. RF Chief Executive Torsten Bell commented, “not bad going at £57 [tax cut] a week—exactly what a young unemployed person is expected to live on via Job Seeker’s Allowance at present.” He noted, “In fact, 83 percent of the gains go to the top 10 percent of households,” adding, “Someone on say an MP’s salary of £79,468 gains £2,946. One nation it is not.”

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady warned that the pay gap under Johnson would get wider. Echoing the Labour Party, which initiated the bank bailout and austerity cuts under the Brown government, she said, “We need an economy that works for everyone, not just the richest 1 percent.”

Grady’s disingenuous remarks cannot cover up the fact that for decades the trade unions, alongside Labour, have collaborated in suppressing the class struggle, sharing responsibility for turning the UK into a cheap labour economy.

Growing wage inequality is only one aspect of inequality in society. When measured against total wealth, inequality reaches almost unimaginable proportions. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the number of billionaires residing in the UK in 2019 grew to 151, up from the 2018 figure of 145.

The richest 1,000 individuals and families hold an unprecedented total wealth of £771.3 billion, up from last year by £47.8 billion. The Sri and Gopi Hinduja family head the richest 1,000 with a fortune worth £22 billion.

According to the RF, a typical income for a family with two children in the UK is £26,400, reaching barely above the poverty line.

A second report, “Where are the missing workers?” was a product of joint research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Centre for Cities think tank. It disputes official government unemployment figures, suggesting that the real rate is three times higher than officially claimed.

While government figures garnered from the ONS sets the rate at 4.6 percent, this does not include hidden employment of those who declare themselves to government surveys as economically inactive. Including those with health or disability issues who could work with support, people who took early retirement, those caring for relatives because of the paucity of social care, and those who have given up hope of finding a job, the OECD/ Centre for Cities analysis puts unemployment at 13.2 percent of the working age population, excluding students. This translates to 4.5 million unemployed, way above the government’s figure of 1.3 million.

The Centre for Cities pinpoints unemployment hotspots in urban areas, which were once the heartland of heavy industry in the 1980s, far exceeding the national average. Hidden unemployment was found to be highest in the city of Liverpool, at 19.8 percent, in comparison with its official rate of 5.8 percent. Following Liverpool in ranking was Sunderland in the North East, Scotland’s Dundee, Blackburn and Birmingham.

The 10 cities with the highest unemployment rates, according to the OECD, are outside London and the South East.

Andrew Carter, chief executive for Centre for Cities, commented, “It is possible that the unemployment rate in Britain’s cities is far higher than official figures suggest. This research suggests that people in cities which have struggled to recover from deindustrialisation of the 20th century could be dealt a second blow as they are ill-equipped to respond to automation.”

The ONS defended its measurement criteria by saying they were based on international definitions and only included “spare employment capacity”—those looking for work or available to begin employment immediately. This methodology indicates that unemployment rates according to international definitions are likely well underestimated by official government figures in other countries as well.

Jobs are being shed in huge numbers throughout the economy. For the past four years jobs have been haemorrhaging in the retail sector. Head of the Retail Consortium, Helen Dickinson, told BBC Radio 4, “We’ll see this underlying trend continue.” This year alone saw 85,000 retail jobs disappear from the high street.

The latest chain to go into receivership are hairdressers Supercuts and baby/maternity retailer Mothercare. The closure of Supercuts’ 220 salons means 1,200 jobs will go. Mothercare went into administration last week and will close all its 79 stores, with the loss of more than 2,800 jobs. Other high street chains closing stores include Coast, House of Frazer and Marks and Spencer.

Latest official figures report a 56,000 drop in employment in the first three months to August. The service sector reported that many job cuts, falling sales, and cancelled or postponed projects were due to uncertainties surrounding Brexit.

Unemployment and immiseration of the masses can only intensify. The burgeoning trade war and growing antagonisms between the major imperialist powers—spearheaded by US President Trump’s America First policy, of which Brexit, as part of the break-up of the European Union, is one expression—look set to tip the world economy into recession as world economic growth slows down, raising unemployment and further depressing wages.

Fascistic Vox party surges in Spanish election as hung parliament emerges

Alex Lantier

The pro-fascist Vox party surged into third place in national elections in Spain Sunday, doubling its presence from 24 to 52 seats in the Congress as a hung parliament emerged for the fourth straight election in Spain since 2015.

Abstention rose to over 30 percent, after a reactionary election campaign oriented around calls for violent police repression of mass protests in Catalonia against the jailing of Catalan nationalists for organizing peaceful protests and a peaceful referendum on Catalan independence in 2017. With tacit support from the pseudo-left Podemos party, the caretaker Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) government pledged a violent crackdown on the protests. This strengthened Vox and the right-wing Popular Party (PP).

The PSOE took 28 percent of the vote and 120 seats, the PP 21 percent (88 seats), Vox 15 percent (52 seats), Podemos 13 percent (35 seats), the right-wing Citizens party 7 percent (10 seats). The PSOE and Podemos both lost over a half-million votes, while Vox won a million more votes and the PP 600,000 more votes than in the last elections.

Resultados electorales desde 2015

The Citizens party fell 9 percent, losing 2.6 million votes. The collapse of the vote for Citizens, a right-wing party founded to oppose Catalan separatism, came as Spanish media gave wall-to-wall coverage to Vox leader Santiago Abascal. An open supporter of fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s army and its record of mass murder of left wing workers during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, Abascal outflanked Citizens on the right, calling for military repression and executions in Catalonia.

Regional nationalist parties maintained their presence in the Congress, as Catalan voters delivered a vote for Catalan nationalist parties despite the deployment of a large force of 4,500 police and Civil Guards to oversee the election in Catalonia. The Republican Left of Catalonia won 13 seats, Together for Catalonia 8, the Basque National Party 7, and the Basque-nationalist EH Bildu 5. The Catalan petty-bourgeois Candidatures of Popular Unity (CUP) won 2 seats while More Country, a pro-PSOE split-off from Podemos led by Inigo Errejon, won 3.

The result is a fourth hung parliament in as many elections since 2015. Neither the PSOE nor the PP, the bourgeoisie’s two traditional parties of government since the 1978 Transition from the Francoite dictatorship to parliamentary rule, have enough seats to obtain an absolute majority of 176 in the 350-seat Congress. Even with their traditional allies, such as Podemos for the PSOE or Citizens or Vox for the PP, they would not reach the 176-seat limit.

For a time last year, amid growing public opposition to police violence in Catalonia following the October 2017 independence referendum, PSOE Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez assembled an unstable governing majority with Podemos, backed by the Catalan nationalists. However, the Catalan nationalists refused to vote the PSOE’s austerity budget this year, as anger mounted in Catalonia over the show trial of Catalan nationalist political prisoners. This brought down the PSOE government this winter.

When the PSOE held new elections in April, hoping to strengthen its position, a new hung parliament emerged instead. No government ever emerged from those elections. The PSOE engaged in failed government talks with Podemos, which ultimately declined to join it, fearing that it would be discredited if it were in government with the PSOE when it handed out harsh prison sentences to the Catalan political prisoners. In September, the PSOE ultimately called these new elections, which have also produced a hung parliament.

Talks attempting to nevertheless form a government will now begin. The Spanish right-wing media are leading a campaign calling for a Grand Coalition PSOE-PP government, modeled on the ruling social-democratic/right-wing coalition government in Germany. A key feature of the “Grand Coalition” plan is that in both cases the main opposition party—the Alternative for Germany (AfD), or Vox in Spain—is a fascistic party.

The right-wing El Mundo said in an editorial last week that today, “The PSOE and the PP will be obliged to sit down at a table to address a grand coalition that allows Spain to start again and end the ungovernability.” Similarly, the right-wing El Espanol published an op-ed declaring, “My vote is for a grand coalition.”

Last night, PP leader Pablo Casado signaled he would be open to forming a grand coalition. “We will be very demanding with the PSOE. We will see what Pedro Sanchez now proposes and then we will be responsible, because Spain cannot continue any longer blocked without a government, hostage to his interests.”

Sanchez for his part responded to the PSOE’s electoral setback by issuing a call last night “to all the parties” to act with “responsibility and generosity” and end the blockage in Madrid. Similarly, last night, an op-ed in the pro-PSOE El Pais titled “Exit strategy” called for “negotiating a minimum program” with “those parties unequivocally committed to the Constitution.”

Whatever the outcome of the talks it is clear the Spanish political system as it emerged from the 1978 Transition from Francoism has suffered a deep breakdown. Discredited by decades of war and austerity since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and in particular by a decade of deep European Union (EU) austerity and mass unemployment after the 2008 Wall Street crash, it is veering ever more sharply to the right. Impervious to explosive social anger among workers, it aims instead to return to authoritarian forms of rule to suppress popular opposition.

The rise of Vox is not the product of broad popular approval of the party’s fascistic anti-Catalan agitation, let alone for Vox’s statements of support for fascist coups and mass murder. In fact, polls showed 59 percent of Spaniards opposing a confrontational policy in Catalonia, despite the press campaign denouncing the Catalan protests.

As in the rest of Europe, the rise of the far right is driven from above, to justify military-police violence and continue increasing social inequality with social cuts and tax cuts for the rich, despite rising mass opposition. Madrid has endlessly stoked Spanish nationalism and resorts to police-state repression in Catalonia, building up the far right. The period since the crackdown in Catalonia in October 2017 has seen Vox go from a minor party obtaining less than 50,000 votes to Spain’s third-largest party.

Over the same period, Podemos lost over 2 million votes, as it endlessly called to form a coalition government with the PSOE, to block opposition to the PSOE on its left. Having abandoned its claims after its foundation in 2015 that it hoped to overtake and replace the PSOE, Podemos is manifestly politically bankrupt and in a state of collapse.

Despite the disastrous electoral results of orienting to the PSOE on the basis of promoting Spanish nationalism, Podemos General Secretary Pablo Iglesias has pushed to continue this orientation. At his last campaign meeting he called Podemos “the only patriotic political force in Spain,” Iglesias said he was appealing to “the vote of the homeland, of the people, of a people who want democracy to defend themselves against the powerful.” This endless promotion of nationalism and the Spanish homeland by Podemos is handing the initiative within official politics to Vox.

India’s Supreme Court validates Hindu supremacist violence

Keith Jones

In a judgment pronounced Saturday, India’s highest court has legitimized the violent, decades-long agitation that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its Hindu supremacist allies have mounted to raze a famous mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, and erect in its stead a temple to the mythical Hindu god Lord Ram.

At the urging of the then most senior BJP leaders and in defiance of express orders from the Supreme Court, Hindu communal activists stormed the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, and demolished the centuries-old structure using axes and sledgehammers. The razing of the Babri Masjid precipitated India’s most serious communal bloodletting since the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 into an explicitly Muslim Pakistan and a mainly Hindu India. More than 2,000 people, most of them poor Muslims, were killed in communal riots and atrocities.

A police officer stands guards on a street in Mumbai, Saturday, Nov. 9, 2019. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)

With its ruling Saturday, India’s Supreme Court has validated the Babri Masjid’s illegal destruction and sanctioned the construction of a temple dedicated to the worship of Lord Ram on its former site. Indeed, India’s highest court has “ordered” the BJP government to oversee the construction of the Ram Mandir (temple).

Not surprisingly Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his BJP, and the leaders of the RSS, the shadowy Hindu nationalist organization that provides most of the BJP’s leading cadre, have rejoiced at the court’s ruling.

“This verdict will further increase people’s faith in judicial processes,” tweeted Modi.

Reaching still more revolting heights of hypocrisy, India’s prime minister said of a judgment that vindicates and will further embolden the Hindu supremacist right, “It clearly illustrates everybody is equal before the law.”

From the outset, the campaign mounted by the BJP, the RSS and the RSS-offshoot the Vishwa Hindu Parishad for the building of a Ram Mandir has combined religious obscurantism—as exemplified by the claim that the site of the Babri Masjid is the birthplace of the mythical God Ram—with calculated communal political provocation. In 1990, to popularize their incendiary demand that the Babri Masjid be replaced by a Hindu temple so as to assert India’s “Hindu character,” that is, Hindu supremacy, BJP President L.K. Advani mounted a nationwide campaign of rallies. Advani’s Ram Rath Yatra campaign incited communal violence across much of north India and culminated in an initial Oct. 1990 attempt to storm and raze the Babri Masjid.

Two years later, Advani and other senior BJP leaders organized and addressed the Dec. 6, 1992, mass rally that served as the cover for the successful attack on the Babri Masjid, in what a government commission of inquiry found to have been a “pre-planned conspiracy” involving the BJP’s top leaders. While BJP-RSS-VHP activists destroyed the 16th century mosque, thousands of police stood by on the orders of Uttar Pradesh’s BJP-led state government.

Since then, the BJP and RSS have continued to promote the building of the Ram Mandir as a key step in realizing their goal of transforming India into a Hindu Raj or Hindu state.

Saturday’s Supreme Court judgment sets aside a 2010 Allahabad High Court ruling that divided the contested 2.77 acre site into three parts, allotting two-thirds to Hindu organizations and the final third to the Sunni (Muslim) Central Board of Wafqs. At the time, the World Socialist Web Site rightly called the Allahabad Court’s ruling “a shameful decision that legitimizes Hindu supremacist ideology and violence”.

The unanimous ruling issued Saturday by a five-member Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi is even more expressly tailored to the demands of the Hindu right, which resented not having been awarded title to the entire site.

The Nov. 9 Supreme Court ruling attests to the extent to which India’s state institutions have become infused with Hindu communalism and India’s ruling elite is breaking with the most elementary democratic principles, and turning toward authoritarian forms of rule.

It follows closely on from the Modi government’s constitutional coup against Kashmir. On Aug. 5, the BJP government illegally stripped Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), India’s lone Muslim-majority state, of its unique semi-autonomous status and transformed it into two Union Territories, placing the region under permanent central government control. Anticipating mass opposition, New Delhi has placed J&K under an ongoing state-of-siege, including mass “preventive” arrests, severe restrictions on people’s movements, and the denial of most cellphone and all internet access.

These actions have repeatedly been greenlighted by India’s Supreme Court. As for India’s opposition parties, they have taken their cue from India’s corporate elite, which wants “strong measures” to assert India’s great-power ambitions on the world stage and to intensify the exploitation of India’s workers and toilers, and which backed Modi’s assault on Kashmir.

The opposition’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s Ayodhya ruling has been of a like kind. The Congress Party, till recently the India bourgeoisie’s preferred party of government, welcomed the Supreme Court’s ruling and announced its support for the building of a Ram temple on the site of the razed Babri Masjid.

The Congress claims to be a bulwark of secularism, but in fact it has a long and notorious record of conniving with the Hindu right, including in enforcing the 1947 communal partition of South Asia. There is much evidence to suggest that Congress Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was forewarned of the 1992 attack on the Babri Masjid, but allowed it to proceed. Currently, the Congress is in backroom negotiations with the fascistic Shiv Sena, till recently the BJP’s closest ally, on extending support to a potential Shiv Sena-led government in Maharashtra, India’s second most populous state.

The Stalinist Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has been promoting the foul lie that the judiciary and the Congress Party are allies of the working class in fighting the BJP and Hindu supremacism, issued a mealy-mouthed statement signaling its support for the Supreme Court ruling. The judgment issued by India’s highest court manifestly legitimizes and rewards Hindu supremacist criminality and violence. Yet the CPM Politburo statement merely terms aspects of the ruling “questionable,” while reiterating its longstanding position that the Ayodhya dispute should be resolved by the courts, if a “negotiated settlement was not possible.”

Given its verdict, the Supreme Court ruling could only be a legal travesty. It was concocted with a predetermined outcome: to strengthen Modi, the BJP government and the Hindu right by delivering them an unequivocal victory in their violent, Hindu supremacist Ram Mandir agitation.

The judgment is steeped in hypocritical re-affirmations of India’s secular polity and the equality of all faiths. It acknowledges that the 1992 razing of the Babri Masjid was a crime. It similarly finds that the smuggling of Ram Lalla (“baby Ram”) idols into the Babri Masjid in 1949, which served as the legal pretext for local authorities working in league with the communalist Hindu Mahasabha to bar Muslim worshipers from the mosque, was a criminal act.

But none of this prevents India’s highest court from unanimously issuing an obscurantist, Hindu-supremacist ruling, and—based on the spurious claim that Muslims never exercised exclusive jurisdiction over the entire site—declaring that title over the disputed land rightfully belongs to the deity Ram Lalla or infant Lord Ram!

As for India’s 200 million Muslims, the Supreme Court expects them to be mollified for the “criminal” destruction of the Babri Masjid and the triumph of the BJP-RSS campaign to assert Hindu supremacy through the building of a Ram Lalla temple by the grant of five-acres at an unspecified site for a new mosque.

The Supreme Court, it must be added, is completely silent on the failure of India’s state authorities—governments, courts and police—to successfully prosecute Advani or any other of the principal instigators and organizers of the Babri Masjid’s demolition and the subsequent wave of communal violence that convulsed India in Dec. 1992–Jan. 1993.

Such is the state of “democratic, secular” India, and the mindset of the India’s highest court in 2019!

Injini Edtech Incubator for African Education Startups (Fully-funded to South Africa) 2020

Application Deadline: 10th December 2019

To Be Taken At (Country): South Africa

About the Award: Do you have a technology-driven or technology-enabled innovation that could improve educational outcomes in Africa? Are you looking to take your early-stage startup to the next level?

Injini is now accepting applications for our next cohort of EdTech changemakers in Africa. If you are one of the selected Cohort 4 startups, you will participate in a five-month incubation programme that will take place both in Cape Town, South Africa and in your home market, where the team will support you remotely.

During this time, you’ll get an opportunity to work with subject matter experts in education, business, technology and entrepreneurship. But that’s not all, just for participating in the programme, you’ll receive a grant of R100,000 to spend on your business. Finally, if we’re impressed with your performance and trajectory once you’ve joined our alumni startups, Injini may offer an investment of up to R1 million for equity in your business!

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: The programme is open to anyone from, based in or focused on any African country.

• Your EdTech startup is based in Africa and focused on improving educational outcomes somewhere on the continent.
• Your solution is aiming to address a key problem related to education in Africa.
• Your solution is evidence-based — meaning, you can point to research that backs up your methods or hypothesis.
• Your company is registered and a certificate of incorporation can be shared with the Injini team upon request.
• Your startup has (at least) a minimum viable product or prototype.
• Your startup has (at least) one full-time founder.
• One or more decision-making members of your startup’s founding team are able to travel to Cape Town during Phases 1 and 3 of the incubation programme.
• Participating founders from outside of South Africa must have a valid passport and eligibility to apply for a South African visa.
• Participating founders must be fluent in English.

Selection: The Cohort 4 Incubation Programme will be made up of three phases.

Phase 1 is set to begin in mid-March 2020 and will take place in Cape Town, South Africa. 1–2 decision-making members of your startup’s founding team will join us for an expenses-paid* stay in the Mother City for a period of six weeks. You’ll be expected to attend a number of business training workshops, engage with industry experts in 1:1 sessions and build a relationship with your mentor, who will support you through the duration of the programme.

Phase 2 will begin the moment you leave Cape Town and head back to your home market. During this 12-week period, you’ll be expected to apply the learnings from Phase 1 to your business on-the-ground, while the Injini team supports you remotely — we may even pop in to visit some of you on your home turf!

Phase 3 will commence back in Cape Town in July 2020, marking the final leg of the incubation programme. This four-week stretch will give us the chance to tie up loose ends and make sure your EdTech startup is ready for post-programme growth and possible investment.

Number of Awards: 20

Value of Award: 

• Everyone in the program will be covered for flights to and from Cape Town, for accommodation , and receive a small allowance for extra living costs incurred while in Cape Town.
•  As part of this revised programme, each start-up will be eligible for a ZAR 100k grant (ca. $7.5k), after which the cohort will compete for follow-on equity investment of up to $75k per startup.

How to Apply: Apply here

• It is important to go through all application requirements on the Programme Webpage (see link below) before applying

Visit the Program Webpage for Details