March 1, 2023: Last day to submit completed application materials from applicants already enrolled in the graduate program and school for which their scholarship is intended.
April 1, 2023: Last day to submit completed application materials from applicants not yet enrolled in the graduate program or school for which the scholarship is intended. Last day to submit completed application materials for applicants who will be attending Cottey College
Offered Annually: Yes
About the PEO International Peace Scholarship: Members of P.E.O. believe that education is fundamental to world peace and understanding. The scholarship is based upon demonstrated need; however, the award is not intended to cover all academic or personal expenses.
Eligibility and Criteria
An applicant must be qualified for admission to full-time graduate study and working toward a graduate degree in an accredited college or university in the united States or canada.
A student who is a citizen or permanent resident of the United States or Canada is not eligible.
Scholarships are not given for research, internships, or practical training, unless it is combined with coursework. Awards are not to be used to pay past debts.
In order to qualify for her first scholarship, an applicant must have a full year of coursework remaining, be enrolled and in residence for the entire school year.
Doctoral students who have completed coursework and are working only on dissertations are not eligible as first-time applicants.
international students attending cottey college are eligible to apply for a scholarship.
Scholarship Worth
The maximum amount awarded to a student is $12,500. Lesser amounts may be awarded according to individual needs.
The scholarship is based upon demonstrated financial need; however, the award is not intended to cover all academic or personal expenses. At the time of application, the applicant is required to confirm additional financial resources adequate to meet her estimated expenses. Additional resources may include personal and family funds, tuition waivers, work scholarships, teaching assistantships, study grants and other scholarships.
Awards are announced in May. The amount of the PEO International scholarship will be divided into two payments to be distributed in August and December
Peru’s Ministry of Health (Minsa) recently announced that the mask mandate implemented at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is ending. This was confirmed in detail by the government on September 29 in Supreme Decree 118-2022-PCM.
The decree provides that masking will only be mandatory in health establishments, on public ground transport, in closed places without ventilation, and for individuals presenting symptoms of COVID-19 infection.
COVID-19 vaccination cards will no longer be required for entry to shopping centers, markets, supermarkets, sports associations, entertainment venues (discotheques, salsódromos, pubs and the like), concerts, theaters, cinemas, gyms, churches, restaurants and similar crowded areas.
In treating the virus as “under control,” Minsa is bowing to the dictates of Peru’s bourgeoisie and foreign investors that Peru’s working class and rural masses must learn to “live with the virus” so profits can be assured.
Peruvian construction workers continue mask use despite lifting of government mandate. (WSWS Media)
Minsa’s flimsy justifications for these abrupt policy reversals consisted of a slight decrease in infections and deaths in September, and an increase in COVID vaccination numbers. According to Minsa, the number of people inoculated with at least one dose has reached 29,859,497, or 89 percent of the population, and those with two doses 28,203,284, or 84 percent.
But the number of citizens with three doses is significantly lower, 20,647,039, or only 62 percent. Meanwhile, less than 15 percent of the population in Peru, under five million, have received a fourth dose, which is widely advocated by the world scientific community for vulnerable people.
Especially given the high rate of reinfection, the government is gambling with the lives of millions, particularly as to those who are unvaccinated or have received only one or two doses.
Camila Gianella Malca, a public policy researcher at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Lima, told Bloomberg earlier in September, “Despite lockdowns, many Peruvians continued to venture out to shop and to work, and so transmission [has] remained stubbornly high.”
Dr. Malca's statement justifies fears of the worst from the new pandemic policies. The suppression of mask use and social distancing means that airborne transmission of the virus will find a breeding ground in stadiums, discotheques and restaurants where hundreds of thousands will be exposed to COVID-19.
The lifting of the minimum distancing measure is particularly pernicious. It endangers the lives of millions of civil construction workers, factory workers, miners and public employees forced to work in close proximity. Construction workers are already condemned to work for low wages and no benefits under the most precarious working conditions and in lower quality jobs.
If anything, recently released public information about the ravages of the pandemic is alarming, not comforting.
On July 20, the first case of a new variant of Omicron BA.5, nicknamed Centauro, BA.2.75, appeared in Peru. Infobae reported that Peru was one of “the first to develop [this] new variant known by many as the ‘son’ of Omicron.”
Peru’s Minister of Health Jorge López said that “many doubts are being raised regarding this new Omicron mutation ... [L]ocated in India, it represents at least 23 percent of the sequenced infections in India and grows at a rate of 17 percent per day faster than the rest of the variants of the BA.2 lineage.” In other words, BA.2.75 is highly transmissible.
Moreover, BA.2.75 is already of worldwide concern. On September 22, Infobae reported that “The ‘Centaur’ subvariant of COVID-19 arrived in Mexico. ... This new strain has been identified in more than 20 countries and is believed to be five times more contagious than previous variants.'
When the first case of BA.2.75 was detected in Peru, the president of the Public Health Committee of the Peruvian Medical Association (CMP), Cesar Portella, warned about the high risk of contagion from the new variant: “People with this Centaurus subvariant can become infected two or three times; vaccination does not prevent infection. There are people in other countries who are infected two, three or even four times, even if they are vaccinated.”
In July, Carlos Padilla, a molecular biologist at the Peruvian National Health Institute (INS), told Agencia Andina, “The SARS-CoV-2 virus is constantly changing, which is why it is important to carry out regular genomic surveillance. If the virus is mutating locally, then we need to determine what its mutations are and what characteristics it is acquiring over time.”
The pandemic is far from defeated. It continues to resurface with new mutations, which, as occurred in Peru with the June-August escalation of deaths, are likely to be more contagious and even more deadly.
The sudden elimination of almost all safety measures against COVID is nothing less than a criminal act by the government of President Pedro Castillo, designed to meet the demands of national businessmen, who face the threat of economic collapse, and foreign investors seeking to reap super-profits off Peru’s mineral wealth.
The Peruvian ruling class most of all fears a popular uprising from below. Urban and rural workers and peasants already struggle with skyrocketing food, gasoline and public transportation prices. The Peruvian masses have displayed their will to resist further oppression though a series of protests, demonstrations and strikes.
The increase of positive cases and death due to lifting the safety measures against COVID can only pour fuel onto these flames.
Recent developments related to Barrick Gold, by some measures the world’s largest gold mining corporation, highlight the heavy dependence of Canada’s mining companies on the imperialist thuggery of the Canadian state for their continued operations and profits.
In April, the Globe & Mail newspaper revealed that Barrick had been ordered to produce as many as 120,000 documents to defend itself in a London UK court. It is being sued by Tanzanian claimants in respect to the killings and injuries of local villagers by Tanzanian police and security forces—paid, fed, and housed by the company—at its North Mara mine. “The claimants,” reported RAID, an anti-corporate malfeasance NGO, “include the family of a nine-year-old girl killed by a mine vehicle driven by police, and four women who were fired upon while gathering around her body. Barrick’s subsidiaries deny liability.”
Over the years scores of villagers have been killed or injured, but leaked documents expose that the Canadian state accepted Barrick’s denials at face value, concerned only to cover up the violence, lest it get in the way of resolving Barrick’s enormous tax and export problems.
The following month the Globe reported some of the sordid details of Barrick’s $190 billion tax and export dispute with Tanzanian authorities, exposing the intimate involvement of Canadian officials and diplomats in Barrick’s negotiations with the Tanzanian government. The Globe, as the principal mouthpiece of Canada’s capitalist ruling class, was determined to obscure the political and historical context of its own reporting.
The truth is that Barrick’s profitable Tanzanian operations only exist due to decades of relentless pressure exerted on Tanzania by the Canadian state, which took full advantage of the political bankruptcy and greed of successive Tanzanian bourgeois nationalist governments.
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) first threatened to withhold food aid in 1985 if Tanzania refused to open up its economy to Canadian mining investments. Canadian state pressure played a major role in bullying Tanzania away from its policy of Ujamaa or agrarian “African Socialism.” In reality Ujamaa had nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. It was a reactionary nationalist and backwards-looking development policy pursued disastrously by the Tanganyika African National Union, (TANU), and then its political successor, the Chama Chai Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) after independence from British colonialism in 1961.
Subsequent “market reforms” demanded and imposed by imperialism combined with colonialism and state-led post-colonial national capitalist development have restricted Tanzania to a very low level of economic development. Annual per capita GDP is $2,200, and half the population lives on less than $1.90 USD per day.
Mining investment is held up by Canadian imperialism as a “solution” to the problem of African development. But the problems of African development are due entirely to capitalism and imperialism. Despite making investors in imperialist countries obscenely wealthy, Tanzania’s entire mining sector accounted for only 6 percent of its meagre US $62 billion GDP in 2020, including investment, wages and taxes. To compare, Canada’s 40 largest mining companies had revenues of US $124 billion in 2020, equivalent to 7.5 percent of Canada’s GDP, with most of this revenue flowing into Canadian markets from foreign mining operations.
Canada is Tanzania’s single largest foreign investor, focused on the removal of billions of dollars of mineral wealth per year from the country, for which the Tanzanian state has historically received a pittance in royalty fees. Similar in many aspects to the political leaders of the former Soviet Stalinist republics, CCM party officials today preside over a corrupt gangster state, with factions battling over control of various rent-seeking and bribe-taking schemes connected to the mining sector and government contracts.
Canadian pressure has only intensified this corruption.
In 1996, in the aftermath of International Monetary Fund (IMF) “structural adjustment reforms,” and after the threat of the withdrawal of hundreds of millions in development loans, “exploration” at what is now Barrick’s Bulyanhulu gold mine was undertaken by a Canadian company, Sutton Resources. Little real “exploration” was required however, as the area was already being mined by more than one hundred thousand small-scale Tanzanian miners, who had been encouraged by the old Ujamaa policy.
Melania Baesi, member of the Shinyanga Region small-scale miners association, which obtained permission from the Tanzanian president for small scale miners to work at Bulyanhulu in 1993. (Image credit: Stephen Kerr, 2002)
Then Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania, Verona Edelstein pressured the Tanzanian government via diplomatic channels, on Tanzanian television and in the press into evicting the small-scale miners from the area to allow the Canadian mine to be built. In the violent evictions that followed, as many as 60 artisanal miners were buried alive when bulldozers filled in their pits. Barrick subsequently purchased Sutton Resources and Bulyanhulu in 1999.
Barrick has enjoyed the constant support of the Canadian state ever since. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper notably used a 2007 trip to Tanzania to visit Barrick’s operations while Barrick was using scabs to break a strike of more than one thousand Bulyanhulu mine workers.
More recently, Canadian mining industry profits were assisted by the Tanzanian government’s abandonment of any fight against the COVID pandemic. Reporting on any COVID cases or testing in Tanzania is illegal. Former president Magufuli declared the pandemic defeated in June 2020, due to “prayer,” but died of COVID himself in early 2021, along with tens of thousands of uncounted Tanzanian workers.
In 2020, as the pandemic raged, Canadian minerals and mining imports experienced 2.5 percent growth, while the value of all other imports save agriculture shrank dramatically. The value of Canadian mining assets abroad increased by 3.5 percent in 2020. Gold miner’s profit per ounce was a record-setting $828 in 2020.
According to a sub-secretary in a Latin American ministry of mines, “the Canadian ambassador here is a representative for Canadian mining companies.”
Canadian imperialism and mining
Canada has 0.48 percent of the global population but is home to 80 percent of the world’s mining companies. The total value of Canadian foreign mining investments stood at $273 billion in 2020, according to Natural Resources Canada. Latin America is the principal target of Canadian mining investment, followed by the US, and then Africa.
Global Canadian mining assets (Image credit: National Resources Canada, Government of Canada)
The dollar value of these capital investments is deceptive, however. The investments extract 50% of their value in revenue each year, ($143 billion in 2021), much of it from structurally impoverished countries with vast mineral wealth. It has been estimated that between 1990 and 2015, imperialist countries appropriated $242 trillion dollars from the former colonial and other historically oppressed countries.
If Canada’s foreign mining investments are often more profitable than many other sectors of the economy, they are so because of the financial support structures for mining corporations created by the imperialist Canadian state, and the pressure it exerts on various comprador bourgeois governments to repress their workers.
Lax rules for the establishment of mining joint stock companies on the Toronto and Vancouver stock exchanges require listed companies to have neither revenue nor profits. [4] Among mining investors, a saying goes that “a gold mine is simply a hole with a liar at the top.” 43 percent of the world’s mining companies are listed on the TSX (Toronto Stock Exchange).
Export Development Canada’s mining loan portfolio of state-backed credit stood at $6.5 billion in 2021. The Canada Pension Plan, which invests the state pension contributions of workers which are deducted from their every paycheque by law, holds major investments in Arnico Eagle, Barrick Gold, Fortis, ARC Resources, Ivanhoe Mines, Kinross Gold Corp, Lundin Mining, Nutrien (formerly Potash Corp) Tek Resources, and Wheaton Precious Metals Corp. There are more mining companies in its stock portfolio than from any other sector of the Canadian economy.
The Canadian Government maintains 160 trade commissioners across the globe, whose job is to translate the demands of Canadian capital into local economic policies favorable to the maximization of Canadian capitalist profits. The Federal Ministry of Global Affairs enforces corporate demands with the full power of the Canadian state, demanding that any country where Canadian firms wish to invest tailor its laws to enable the maximum extraction of profits.
The recent history of Barrick Gold in Tanzania illustrates these relationships in stark detail.
Profits dependent on the Canadian state
When the Tanzanian government inspected Barrick’s “gold concentrate” shipments (a semi-processed ore requiring special refining techniques) bound for export in the port of Dar Es Salam in early 2017, it allegedly found that the quantity of gold and other minerals in the concentrates was much larger than the company’s officials had declared.
Barrick’s then-Tanzanian subsidiary Acacia Mining reported that each shipping container of gold concentrate contained 3kg of gold. But the Tanzanian government’s audit determined that the gold content was 7.3 kg per container.
Because the Tanzanian government’s agreement with Barrick and other gold miners levied a royalty of 4 percent of the gold value exported, long-term under-reporting of the gold content in “concentrates” would mean that the Tanzanian government was being cheated of significant royalties for decades; “significant” at least in terms of the pittances offered to it by its old contract with Barrick.
The Tanzanian audit determined that the total value of the gold in concentrate really being exported from the country by Barrick was in excess of $1.8 billion per year, as opposed to the $1.045 billion as declared by the company, and for which the Tanzanian government would have been paid approximately $72 million, instead of the $42 million it actually received. This came on top of ongoing tax disputes dating back to 2000 worth $500 million. Acacia had claimed to be “non-resident” in Tanzania for tax purposes, as it was incorporated in the UK, and that Tanzanian law therefore did not require it to pay any taxes.
In response to the findings of the audit, the Tanzanian government enacted a ban on the export of gold and copper concentrates, seeking to pressure the miners to establish gold smelting resources in Tanzania. There was then only a single gold smelter capable of refining .999 pure gold on the entire African continent, in South Africa.
The Tanzanian government next levied a bill of $190 billion in back taxes, royalties, and penalties on Acacia, causing Barrick’s stock value to plummet. This crisis for Barrick’s shareholders immediately became the business of the Canadian state. Email communications of Canadian government officials obtained by Ottawa-based researcher Ken Rubin, many highly redacted, document the relentless pressure applied by the Canadian government to force the Tanzanian government into compliance.
At each step, Canadian officials translated Barrick’s demands into their meetings with Tanzanian officials. Barrick Gold’s executives pointed Canadian trade officials towards the Canadian government’s foreign aid to Tanzania, including $2.9 million for the Minerals Audit Agency which had challenged Barrick’s claims. “The federal officials seemed ready to cite this funding in their discussions with the Tanzanian government, although the details are redacted from the released e-mails,” reports the Globe. The verb “cite” is more likely a polite euphemism for “threaten to cut off.”
The Canadian trade commissioner met about the matter with the Tanzanian Minerals Minister Sospeter Muhongo, who was himself fired only weeks later, accused of being party to a much larger tax evasion scheme together with Domenik Rwekaza, the head of the Tanzanian Minerals Audit Agency. Muhongo was previously dismissed in 2015 in connection with the embezzlement of up to $800 million from the Tanzanian Central Bank in the “Tegeta escrow scandal.”
“Talking points for the meeting, prepared by a Canadian trade commissioner, suggested the high commissioner could try to resolve the tax dispute by promoting Acacia’s offer to pay for a study of a possible copper smelter in Tanzania, and by urging the minister to consider using a Canadian-funded legal support facility to settle the tax issue,” according to the Globe. This refers to a 1997 tax treaty which favours Canadian investors.
Knowing the legacy of violence and state-repression against the local population at Barrick’s North Mara gold mine might come up, the trade commissioner also made the ridiculous assertion that the situation there “had normalized.”
Barrick President Kevin Dushinsky also met with Canadian deputy trade minister Timothy Sargent to plan a joint strategy. While the Globe & Mail article states: “Canadian officials said Mr. Sargent could suggest that Barrick should ‘spell out’ to Tanzania that the dispute might cause a loss of jobs and revenue and could damage Tanzania’s reputation as an investment destination,” this is another euphemism. What they were really referring to are Canadian government threats of an investment strike against Tanzania, and the cut-off of government aid. Canadian officials went all the way up to then Tanzanian President Magufuli, “to advocate on Acacia’s behalf.” Specific details of official Canadian government “advocacy” were redacted from the released documents.
The dispute took nearly four years to resolve, with Barrick agreeing to pay $300 million of the $190 billion tax claim, (0.15 percent) and to restructure its operations into a 50/50 joint venture with the Tanzanian government, which now operates Barrick’s three Tanzanian Mines as “Twiga Minerals.”
While the capitalist press in Canada has presented the Tanzanian push for a gold smelter simply as a question of jobs and “economic development,” this is another cover story.
The practice of exporting unrefined gold concentrates for refining offshore permits all gold miners in Africa–not just Barrick—to lowball their taxes and royalty payments on those exports. Refining all gold in the country where it was mined would make such practices much more difficult, if not impossible. That was likely not the entire focus of Tanzanian government officials however, as most gold concentrates are refined by copper smelters, not gold smelting facilities.
The smelting of partly refined “doré” gold bars produced by mine refineries into .999 monetary bars is jealously guarded by finance capital. Switzerland has 70 percent of the world’s gold refining capacity, followed by Germany, Japan and South Africa. Switzerland is the world center of private banking, and most “good delivery bars,” which can back metals futures contracts on the LME, are produced by only seven large refiners, four of which are Swiss. There are very lax controls for reporting about the origins of the gold which arrives in Switzerland.
Further, virtually all the gold bullion banks which make up the London Bullion Market Association, and which purchase much of the world’s gold, including Credit Suisse, BNP Paribas, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, ICBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Merrill Lynch, have been convicted in multiple tax avoidance, bribery and global money laundering schemes involving billions of dollars. Many of these scams have been connected to projects in the developing world. Tanzania’s demand for a .999 fine gold smelter needs to be seen in this context – Tanzanian government officials were likely making a bid to be “cut in” on yet another lucrative aspect of the global gold trade.
A joint venture between Tanzania, and investors from Singapore and Dubai finally established a .999 gold smelting facility in 2021 in response to the Barrick scandal, but this will accept mostly doré bars from small-scale miners, and export refined gold into the Middle East. Barrick’s Twiga joint venture continues to export its gold concentrates for refining offshore.
Canadian mining profits rely on savage political repression
The intense extraction of super-profits in Tanzania, and brutal competition for a share of the spoils at the top levels of the state, creates a climate of repression and violence at all levels of society, from the political opposition and journalists down to the level of the villagers who are displaced by its operations.
The violence at North Mara stems from the periodic incursions into the mine by impoverished and desperate local villagers, who attempt to find bits of gold, and also from social protests. The mine’s tailings pond has poisoned a local water supply.
Mining Watch Canada documented 22 killings and 69 injuries of locals at the North Mara mine between 2014 and 2016, and Acacia has acknowledged an additional 28 “intruder fatalities” from 2014 to 2017. A 2016 Tanzanian Parliamentary inquiry found 65 killed, and 270 injured. In released emails, Canadian officials simply repeated that Acacia “made a statement fully refuting the reported allegations…”
The allegations continue to pile up. The British aid group RAID (Rights and Accountability in Development) has documented four additional deaths and two injuries since 2019: “Three of those killed were attempting to leave, or had been chased from, the mine site. Two were shot with live ammunition while the third was struck with a large projectile, possibly a teargas canister or sound bomb, in the back of his head.”
According to the Globe, “A former security officer at North Mara, who worked at the mine for many years, said he often witnessed abuses by Tanzanian police against trespassers at the mine site. ‘On a regular basis, you’d see them beating up intruders with big long sticks, shooting them, just abusing them’ ... He said he witnessed dozens of incidents in which the police fired live ammunition at trespassers, including three shootings that caused deaths. The incidents were always reported to the mine’s management,” according to the former officer, who now fears for his own life.
Those who speak out against the operations of Canadian mining companies in Tanzania often have cause to fear for their lives. The Toronto Star reported in 2019 that reporters investigating numerous accusations of fraud related to Barrick’s Tanzanian activities received anonymous threats.
In July of 2017, Tanzanian newspaper Mawio was banned by the government the day after publishing an article suggesting that former Tanzanian Presidents Benjamin Mkapa and Jaya Kikwete were parties to fraud in various mining deals struck with foreign firms dating back to the 1990s. The ban on the paper was only lifted in February 2022, after the death of Magufuli and his replacement by President Samia Suluhu Hassan. Mining contracts in Tanzania signed before January 2021 have been treated as secret by successive Tanzanian governments and are often not even reviewed by Parliament.
Wikileaks’ exposure of US diplomatic cables also revealed that Tanzania’s Public Prosecutor Edward Hoseah also received death threats after his investigations into official corruption approached senior officials around former President Kikwete, and that the upper reaches of the CCM were “untouchable.” The UK’s Serious Fraud Office investigated Acacia in 2017 in response to whistleblowers who accused Acacia employees of bribing Tanzanian government officials.
Tundu Lissu speaks to international fact-finding mission at Bulyanhulu in 2002 (Photo Credit Stephen Kerr).
In September 2017, unknown assassins shot Tanzanian opposition leader Tundu Lissu with more than 32 machine gun rounds. Lissu, who has led multiple campaigns against Barrick Gold and other foreign miners for the last 25 years, survived but only after many surgeries. Lissu was forced to flee to exile in Belgium. Opposition politicians and activists are regular targets for beatings, outright murder, trumped up charges and imprisonment.
Emails from Canadian officials concerned with Barrick’s tax dispute expressed concern only about how to best cover all of this up: “If the Canada brand is to accompany this project, along with any other work we do on behalf of Barrick, we’ll need to do some serious work on the CSR [corporate social responsibility] front.”
Behold, the serious work:
Barrick Gold has now committed to spend $6 out of every gold ounce produced at North Mara and Bulyanhulu on “improving healthcare, education, infrastructure and access to potable water in their communities.” It has allocated $70 million for projects including training mine workers at Tanzanian universities. Barrick earned $488 million in Q2 2022, up from $411 million in Q1 2021.
In 2018, as it was busy advocating for Barrick’s Tanzanian profits, the Trudeau government pledged to create a new watchdog with the power to investigate the activities of Canadian mining companies abroad, in the form of the “Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise.” After receiving “an onslaught of mining industry lobbying,” the Trudeau government quietly gutted the office, which has no enforcement power. Established in 2019, it has received 15 complaints, all of which remain in the initial stages of investigation.
As the Ebola outbreak intensifies in Uganda, the Biden administration announced last Thursday that all passengers who had been in the African nation in the last 21 days would be diverted to airports in New York, Newark, Atlanta, Chicago or Washington where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection would conduct screening to determine if they are infected.
As Politico recently noted, “The FAA could not immediately provide a list of how many flights from Uganda head stateside on a daily basis, but foreign carriers such as KLM and Emirates offer flights to multiple American destinations.”
Besides a risk assessment, visual symptoms and temperature check, the travelers’ contact information would be shared with local and state health departments. However, rather than offering Uganda the necessary expertise or the funds requested by the World Health Organization (WHO) to contain and combat the spread of the deadly virus, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra offered Ugandan Health Minister Dr. Jane Aceng Ocero a perfunctory message of goodwill, saying that the administration was ready “to support Uganda through this challenging period.”
The WHO has released $2 million from its contingency fund for emergencies and sending additional specialists, supplies and resources. But this tiny amount will hardly cover the cost of a large-scale public health intervention to stamp out the Ebola outbreaks that threatens to spill over into Uganda’s densely populated capital, Kampala. The international agency had called for $18 million, but Ugandan health officials had indicated that far more would be required to cover logistics and manpower.
Since the declaration of the Ebola outbreak on September 20, 2022 by Ugandan health officials, the number of confirmed and probable cases of Ebola infections with the rare Sudan virus has climbed to 43 confirmed and 20 probable cases, 63 in all. At present, there are no vaccines or treatments that are effective against this strain of the Ebola virus. The last outbreak with the Sudan virus in Uganda occurred 10 years ago.
WHO Chief Scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan explained that six different vaccines are at various stages of development, and trials with either the University of Oxford or Sabin Vaccine Institute vaccines will hopefully begin in the coming weeks.
During the WHO press briefing last week, she said, “Our R&D Blueprint team, led by Ana Maria Henao, has been working very closely with the Ugandan Ministry of Health but also with other partners, including CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and with the manufacturers. There are about six vaccine candidates available for the Sudan Ebola virus, which are mostly in very early stages of development, but three of them have some human data, some immunogenicity and safety data, and so they can actually proceed to be used in the field in a ring vaccination campaign, similar to what was done in the Ebola outbreak in DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo] a couple years ago.”
With regards to the two leading candidates, she added, “There are very limited doses available, unfortunately, of both of them. There is raw material, so there has to be some fill and finish to make the product ready, and at the same time, of course, a protocol has to be developed, submitted to the Ethics Review Committee. The principal investigator has been identified, funding is being mobilized and so all the preparations are ongoing.”
There have been 29 deaths as of October 5, of which nine have been confirmed as related to Ebola. These include four health care workers, the latest a 58-year-old anesthetic officer, Nabisubi Margaret, who died on October 4 after battling her disease for 17 days at Fort Portal referral hospital. However, six more health care workers have been infected.
More concerning is that the outbreak has now spread to at least five sub-counties that include Mubende and Kassanda districts in Central Region, and Bunyangabu, Kagadi and Kyegegwa districts in Western Region, Uganda, both on a busy commercial corridor that connects Kampala to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). However, a recent report in the Monitor noted that a person suspected of Ebola died in the Northern District of Nebbi, far from the current outbreaks.
Figure 1 Map of Uganda and affected regions. Red confirmed Sudan virus. Black probable Ebola outbreak.
On October 5, 2022, a 57-year-old man died two hours after being admitted to Orussi Health Center III in the Nebbi District situated at the border of the DRC and Lake Albert. The district’s health officer, Dr. Justine Okwairworth, told the press, “The deceased presented acute signs and symptoms, especially fever, bloody diarrhea and vomiting of blood. We then became suspicious of this and collected blood samples which we forwarded and are waiting results.”
The deceased had attended a burial ceremony for a relative in the neighboring DRC where it is suspected he became infected. One of the elements of the posthumous rites and burial traditions for the displaying of grief is to wash and dress the body of the deceased, which risks infection if Ebola was the cause of death.
In the case of the Ugandan elderly man, it remains to be seen if the virus is of the Sudan strain and part of the current outbreak ,which would imply the spread is dispersed far more broadly. Introduction of the Zaire strain in this region would mean potentially two simultaneous outbreaks. Regardless, it raises further the specter of the ongoing threat posed by Ebola in the region and neighboring countries.
Since the mid-90s, there have been around two dozen outbreaks reported across Central and West Africa. The largest epidemic, between December 2013 and June 2016, was spread across Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea with local outbreaks in Nigeria, Mali, Senegal and exported to the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom and Italy. In all, almost 29,000 people were infected, and 11,310 people died from the Ebola Zaire virus. Fatality rates ranged from 57 to 71 percent.
The current fatality rate with the Sudan virus is over 40 percent, which underscores the seriousness of these infections. It is not a matter of if but when an outbreak with such pathogens will emerge more broadly across the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that not only were capitalist governments unprepared for the eruption of these pathogens, but they have also gone as far as completely dismantling their public health systems to prevent any interruption in the drive to exploit the working class.
Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s president for life, recently said, “I want to reassure all Ugandans and all residents that the government will quickly gain control of this outbreak as we have done before. Therefore, there is no need for anxiety, panic, restriction of movement, or unnecessary closure of public places like schools, markets and places of worship as of now.”
Meanwhile, as Aceng noted, health authorities are fighting misinformation and mistrust of the public at the epicenter of the outbreak in Mubende district. She told the press, “People are not dying of witchcraft, they are dying due to Ebola. The public should cooperate with the health workers and response teams to curb the spread of this outbreak.”
However, frontline health workers are also facing concerns about their own safety. As TheLancet wrote on Saturday, “There is also the challenge of allaying the concerns of front-line health workers regarding their safety. Trainee medics announced a strike, accusing the government of risking their lives without making adequate provision for safety gear, insurance coverage, and risk allowances.”
Dr. Gary Kobinger, a virologist and Ebola specialist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, told Nature that the vaccines and antivirals by themselves will not end the outbreak. With the geographic boundaries of spread increasing and resources overstretched, the virus “could easily find new footholds,” as is being demonstrated now. “Right now, the outbreak is at a make-or-break moment,” he said. Hopeful that the current measures will contain the outbreak, he is concerned that it could “really get out of hand.”
It is now clear that in its first budget, due on October 25, Australia’s Labor government will retain planned massive income tax cuts for the wealthy, while starting to further slash health and disability services and escalate military spending in preparation for a US-led war against China.
Yesterday, in line with a barrage of warnings and demands from corporate media headlines and editorials, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese ruled out any reversal of Labor’s pledge to implement “Stage Three” tax cuts for high-income households in 2024. This means an unprecedented bonanza for the rich, on top of two previous tax cut packages.
Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers (right) being briefed by Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy
At the same time, Labor’s already-ditched May election slogan of “a better future” has been replaced by chilling warnings from Albanese, Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Defence Minister Richard Marles of “global economic storms” and “the most challenging circumstances” since World War II.
In the lead-up to the budget, Albanese and Chalmers have sought to condition the public to expect deepening cuts to social spending. They have named three crucial areas of alleged unexpected budget blowouts—hospitals, aged care and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
Simultaneously, the pair has declared the need to ramp up military spending and pay for higher interest rates on the more than $1 trillion in government debt, which was incurred by handing billions of dollars to big business throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Increasingly, the government’s plans are dominated by the looming global recession being induced by central banks, which are hiking interest rates to stifle workers’ wage demands to cope with the soaring inflation triggered by the pandemic and the escalating US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Just two weeks before the budget, Chalmers will tomorrow fly to Washington for what he called “perfectly timed” talks about mounting “budget pressures.” He will meet for a “candid assessment” with US Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell, World Bank president David Malpass and other G20 finance ministers.
“It will be all about difficult decisions in difficult times,” Chalmers said. He warned that Australia “won’t be spared a global downturn,” further repudiating Labor’s false election promises of better times.
The “Stage Three” tax cuts will cost $243 billion over a decade. Inevitably, that means further gutting public health, education and other social programs, and imposing even greater social inequality, which has already accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Treasury estimates in August 2021, when Labor confirmed its commitment to back the cuts legislated by the previous Liberal-National Coalition government, they will benefit a dual-income household on $400,000 a year by $23,280 annually. But a single person on $30,000 will receive just $255, or $5 a week.
This is a virtual flat tax regime, with a uniform 30 percent tax rate for all income up to $200,000 a year—about three times the median wage. Those trying to survive on poverty-line social security payments, such as aged pensioners, carers and the unemployed, will get nothing.
Today, Chalmers and Marles added the war dimension to the budget plans. They recommitted the government to raising annual military spending from 2 percent to 2.2 percent of gross domestic product, reaching $80 billion a year by 2032. That does not count the $300 billion designated for upgraded military weaponry over a decade.
This was also, they emphasised, in addition to the as-yet unstated tens of billions of dollars required to acquire and base nuclear-powered submarines and other weaponry under the anti-China AUKUS military pact with the US and UK, and to expand the size of the armed forces by 20,000 to over 100,000.
Chalmers and Marles revealed a $6.5 billion blowout on 18 existing big military hardware projects, so no doubt all these defence spending estimates will mushroom in the next few years.
Marles spoke directly in the language of wartime sacrifices. “We face the most challenging circumstances since the Second World War, compounded by the fact that the economy is facing serious pressures—and reaching record spending within Defence as a percent of GDP,” he said.
Albanese delivered a similar message of sacrifice yesterday, saying Chalmers was framing a budget in “very difficult economic circumstances.” Albanese declared the need for monetary and fiscal policy to work in concert to avoid fueling inflation.
That is code for cutting social spending and suppressing workers’ wage rise demands, in sync with the central banks aggressively raising interest rates.
The prime minister reassured the financial markets: “Labor will always present responsible budgets. That’s what we’ll be doing in two weeks’ time.”
Labor’s targeting of the NDIS, hospitals and aged care comes on top of its support for the pre-election budget handed down by the Morrison Coalition government in March, which contained a huge cut to health spending—by $10 billion to $105 billion this year, or more than 10 percent in real terms.
This has meant less money for COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and support for doctors, aged care providers and overwhelmed public hospitals. That Labor-backed budget also imposed cuts to education, arts and climate change programs.
Albanese’s commitment to the “Stage Three” tax handouts is only a part of Labor’s wider dedication to enriching the corporate elite at the expense of the working class. After its 2019 election defeat, the party dropped its phony “fair go” slogan, which many workers did not believe in any case because of Labor’s long pro-business record.
Labor also ditched promises to adjust the “negative gearing” scheme, which rewards property investors and drives up home prices, reduce capital gains tax discounts and abolish “franking credits” refunds for investors who received dividends from their share portfolios, yet pay no income tax.
None of this is an aberration. It is entirely consistent with the party’s historic record of service to the ruling capitalist class, including on tax. The Hawke and Keating Labor governments of 1983 to 1996 cut the top income tax rate from 60 percent to 49 percent, and the company tax rate from 49 to 33 percent.
That was a central plank of Labor’s economic program. The trade unions enforced it as part of their prices and incomes Accords with the Labor governments and employers. The unions strangled workers’ opposition, helping to lay the basis for a vast ongoing transfer of wealth to the rich from the working class.
Today, this Labor government is relying even more on the unions, which are increasingly discredited shells as a result of their decades of betrayals. Together, they are seeking to impose far deeper attacks on working-class conditions, along with the greatest real wage cuts since the 1930s Great Depression, the government’s deadly “live with the virus” pandemic policies and preparations for a potentially catastrophic US-instigated World War III against Russia and China.
About 7,000 lecturers, researchers, tutors and non-academic staff at New Zealand’s eight universities held a half-day strike on October 6 to demand decent pay increases that keep up with the soaring cost of living.
Striking Victoria University of Wellington workers and supporters on October 6, 2022. [Photo: WSWS]
Protest rallies took place at Auckland University, Auckland University of Technology (AUT), Massey University, Waikato University, Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), Canterbury University and Lincoln University and Otago University. Staff were joined by significant numbers of students and other supporters.
According to the Tertiary Education Union (TEU), its members, and university-based members of the Public Service Association and E tū union, voted 87 percent in favour of strike action. This is an indication of the immense anger that has built up over decades of underfunding, pro-business restructuring, constant waves of staff cuts and years of stagnant wages.
The unions have called for an 8 percent pay increase, which is barely above the annual inflation rate of 7.3 percent. At present, pay offers are significantly below inflation: Auckland University, for instance, has offered 9 percent spread across two years.
The crisis facing higher education has worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to a precipitous drop in international student numbers. While the details vary in different institutions, pay has essentially been frozen and hundreds of staff have been laid off over the past two years. Job cuts are continuing, with AUT recently announcing 230 redundancies.
Last Thursday’s strike is part of an upsurge in the class struggle internationally in opposition to soaring living costs driven by the pandemic, the state bailouts of big business, and the US-NATO war with Russia over Ukraine. Thousands of university workers have taken strike action in Britain and Australia, among other countries.
The New Zealand strike coincided with week-long action by thousands of nurses, who refused to work extra shifts to protest against a pay cut and dangerous levels of understaffing. Firefighters have also held nationwide strikes after rejecting a below-inflation pay offer.
According to Stuff, Education Minister Chris Hipkins “was reluctant to give a viewpoint on the strike action, given the government didn’t employ university staff and were not a part of the bargaining process.” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: “We have increased the subsidy rate from central government in order to support universities with their additional costs.”
In fact, the Labour Party-led government is starving essential services, including education, in order to maintain low taxes for the rich and to force the working class to pay for tens of billions of dollars in subsidies for big business over the past two years. This year, the government increased tuition and training subsidies for tertiary education by just 2.75 percent, well below the inflation rate. Labour has reneged on its 2017 election pledge to fund three years of free tertiary education; domestic students are eligible for just one year of fees-free study.
A lecturer in the VUW Centre for Science in Society, who attended Thursday’s rally, told the WSWS: “There’s been a persistent failure to recognise that university staff have been overworked for many years and that workloads increased during the pandemic because of things like moving online, the pressure of family life, the general anxiety of existing during the pandemic.”
Tutors, paid as little as $22.22 an hour, have been offered a zero increase from VUW for the next two years. The lecturer said: “I just want to point out the irony that the university markets its degrees as valuable and competitive to students, [who] pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a qualification from one of New Zealand’s leading universities.” Then VUW “turns around and pays [close to the] minimum wage” to postgraduate students who become tutors.
Dolores Janiewski, a lecturer in the VUW history department, said she was most concerned about tutors, “the lowest paid and most precarious staff members.” She believed the university leadership viewed staff “as a cost, and the fewer of us the better because the books look better, even though that isn’t necessarily delivering quality education. Attrition and voluntary redundancy is part of the problem: there are fewer people having to do just as much work, and as a result workloads are getting bigger, and there aren’t people to do it.”
Janiewski said VUW’s decision to dock its workers’ pay for the duration of the 4.5 hour strike was “antagonising staff even further” and showed that the university did not understand how staff work. She would still have to do the same amount of work to prepare for her upcoming lectures.
She questioned the claims that there is not enough money for a meaningful pay increase, saying: “I would really like to know how much money is being used on central administration, and what the salary scales are. What are the overheads? How much do the faculties have to subsidise the central administration?” Janiewski also said the national strike action was sending a message to the government, and she called for funding per student to increase.
Across the country, striking workers made similar statements. Radio NZ reported that one Auckland University staff member said: “They told us things would be tight during COVID, and then they’ve told us about all the profit they made… Over the last few years, in real terms, our pay has maybe fallen by 17 percent.” The university reportedly made an after tax profit of $100 million last year.
The strike revealed determination among university workers to fight for decent pay and conditions for themselves and for students. The government and university administrations, however, are relying on the unions to limit the action as much as possible and to prevent university staff from linking their struggle with that of healthcare workers, firefighters, schoolteachers and others who face the same assault on their standard of living.
The TEU’s leadership, which supports the Labour-Greens government, has called for tripartite talks with Minister Hipkins and the universities to resolve the dispute.
Highlighting the role the union has played in keeping wages down, TEU national secretary Sandra Grey told Newshub on October 4 that over the past two years it has accepted “the lowest pay increases of any workers in New Zealand, because we actually said to our employers: we understand COVID’s hard on the universities and on the polytechnics, and we did our bit.”
The immense anger among workers forced the TEU to call a nationwide strike for the first time in 20 years. However, the union’s current wage claim would still keep wages basically frozen relative to the cost of living and do nothing to make up for more than a decade of cuts.
A recent study commissioned by the TEU found that salaries fell by 10 percent at the University of Otago, 12.2 percent at Canterbury and 17 percent at Auckland University between 2007 and 2021. During this time, there were no nationwide strikes and the union bureaucracy’s typical response was to accept job and wage cuts as necessary.
