Tinubu government mobilises police and army to crush protests across Nigeria

Jean Shaoul

Young people have been taking to the streets across Nigeria since Thursday to protest the soaring cost of living, the removal of the electricity subsidy, high unemployment, and rampant corruption.

The protests, under the banner of #EndBadGovernanceInNigeria, are the fifth major action against the government since President Bola Tinubu, who has imposed a brutal austerity programme on behalf of Nigeria’s creditors, came to power in a heavily disputed election in May 2023.

People protest against the economic hardship on the street in Lagos, Nigeria, August 2, 2024 [AP Photo/Sunday Alamba]

They have met a savage crackdown from the security forces, aimed at intimidating and criminalising peaceful protests and media reporting, in the interest of Nigeria’s kleptocrats and the transnational energy corporations that have looted the country’s wealth.

Amnesty International said that the security forces had killed 13—at least four of whom were bystanders—across Nigeria on the first day of the protests, with some Nigerian news outlets saying that at least 17 people have been killed, including in the federal capital Abuja and in Kano. It follows warnings that the authorities would impose restrictive conditions on the planned protests in Abuja and Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city and commercial capital.

Police Chief Kayode Egbetokun had announced that the security agencies would “deal decisively” with anyone they considered a threat to public order. He accused protesters of trying to destabilize the country.

Military spokesman Major General Edward Buba said the army would intervene to forestall any protests that threatened to breach public order. He insisted that the military would not allow any repeat of the #EndSARS protests against police brutality in October 2020 that led to the deaths of 69 people and the wounding of hundreds across the country by government soldiers.

In Abuja, the federal capital, protests turned violent when police fired bullets and tear gas to stop protesters marching on the city centre and satellite towns. Nigerian police said that nearly 700 protesters have been arrested across the country while nine officers have been injured by Saturday.

A journalist’s car was hit by bullets and at least 50 journalists arrested. According to six journalists in Abuja who spoke to the AP news agency, the Department of State Service, notorious for its brutality, had dispatched hooded operatives to disperse the protesters and then fired gunshots at the journalists who were still at the national stadium. Nigeria is ranked 112th out of 180 countries in the latest World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders.

Hunger is by far the main issue. In Lagos, one of the placards read, “One day, the poor will have nothing else to eat but the rich oppressors.” Even though the protests there were relatively muted, there were armed police across the city, including in places far from the protest zones where there were no demonstrations.

The state governments of Kano, Jigawa, Yobe and Katsina imposed a 24-hour lockdown, banning people from leaving their homes on Friday, claiming “hoodlums” had hijacked the protests to loot and vandalise properties.

Borno state announced a 24-hour lockdown on Thursday night after anti-government protesters began marching in the state capital Maiduguri. According to police chief Egbetokun, this was because an “explosion” had killed four people within a crowd of protesters in Borno, while another 34 were “severely injured.” But on Wednesday night, a blast—believed to have been caused by the jihadist group Boko Haram—had killed 16 people at a teashop in the rural community of Kawori.

The government’s crackdown followed attempts to pre-empt the demonstrations. Tinubu announced a hike in the national minimum wage from N30,000 to N70,000 ($43) a month. This was far less than the N494,000 the trade unions had been calling for when they called off a general strike after two days, with the lying claim that the government was considering N250,000 a month in June. He also promised the government would develop financial programmes to alleviate the impact of soaring prices and a falling currency.

Tinubu cynically announced that he would take just half his official salary. Given that he is one of the richest men in the country, that didn’t cut much ice with Nigeria’s unemployed. Neither did the offer by National Assembly members, some of the most highly paid legislators in the world who also receive additional and even larger sums that are not disclosed, to donate half their salaries to charity.

Tinubu mobilised some of the country’s most senior imams, bishops, traditional leaders and retired military officers to intervene in a bid to forestall protests dubbed “Days of Rage” like those that had rocked Kenya and forced President William Ruto to abandon planned tax hikes and fire his cabinet last month. They warned that insurgents such as the Islamic State West Africa Province would try to take advantage of any instability in Nigeria.

None of this did anything to appease the youth who form the vast majority of Nigeria 222 million population and are unable to afford food, let alone education or find a job. Some 40 percent of Nigerians live in extreme poverty. The cost of food is so high and incomes so low that a staggering 37 percent of children in Nigeria are stunted (chronically malnourished or low height for age), more than half of them severely, while 18 percent of children suffer from wasting (acutely malnourished or low weight for height), half of them severely.

The protest organisers, NGOs and activist organisations, had called on social media for 10 days of street demonstrations starting August 1. Their demands, 19 in total, include: an end to inflation now running at 34 percent, jobs, increased security amid a rise in kidnappings for ransom, a reduction in government costs and electoral, judicial and constitutional reform.

These conditions have been exacerbated by Tinubu’s removal of the fuel subsidy, introduced decades ago because despite being a major oil producer, Africa’s largest, Nigeria has little oil refinery capacity. The removal of the subsidy, with 75 percent of Nigeria’s electricity supply coming from diesel and petrol-powered generators, tripled the cost of fuel, putting electricity and transport out of reach and driving up manufacturing costs. In addition, after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) floated the naira, previously pegged to the US dollar, to encourage foreign investment in the country, the currency fell by 70 percent, fueling inflation. The CBN has raised interest rates to an unprecedented 26.25 percent, pushing up the cost of debt servicing and eliminating any possibility of a social safety net.

Ethnic and religious conflicts have disrupted agriculture, including armed conflicts with jihadist groups in the northeast and Biafran separatists in the southeast, herder-farmer conflicts in north-central, the widespread operations of criminal gangs as well as kidnappings to extort a ransom. Nigeria, once a large net exporter of food, now imports some of its food products.

Nigeria is by no means unique. Similar conditions of poverty and police brutality are replicated across the continent that has seen youth-led mass protests and strikes in Kenya, Uganda, Senegal, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Algeria, Morocco and South Africa, as well as nine military takeovers in the past five years aimed at preventing the overthrow of the ruling elites.

The sheer scale of the continent’s young population—some 60 percent are under 25 years of age, of whom few have any realistic prospect of a secure job and a decent future—testifies to the powder keg that is Africa.

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo warned that Africa was staring at the abyss. Speaking in an interview with CNN affiliate Citizen TV, he said, “All over Africa, we are… sitting on a keg of gunpowder,” adding, “There’s virtually no exception (country) in Africa where the youth are not angry. They are unemployed… unempowered and they see nothing other than hopelessness.” Obasanjo warned that “if no adequate attention is paid to the needs of the youth in Africa… it will be very ugly for all of us.”

Cost-of-living crisis fuels financial stress and job losses in Australia

Mike Head

Data released last week shows that the cost-of-living crisis is having a devastating impact on financially-stressed working-class households in Australia, amid rising job losses and signs of recession.

Unemployed workers registering for social welfare outside Centrelink office in Sydney, Australia, 2020.

First of all, far from receding, inflation is resurging, further cutting real wages. The official Consumer Price Index rose from 3.6 percent in the March quarter to 3.8 percent in the June quarter, rebounding after falling from 7.8 percent in December 2022.

Costs for workers and their families rose even more sharply. Soaring rents, building construction costs, insurance premiums, fuel prices and increases in the cost of fruit and vegetable drove up price rises for essential items by an average of 4.5 percent.

Even that underestimates the shock to working-class households. The latest available Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures estimated that the living cost index for “employee households” rose by 6.5 percent over the past year, primarily fueled by much higher home mortgage payments and education costs.

The ongoing cut in living standards is reflected in falling retail sales. They dropped by 3 percent per person in the June quarter. They are down 6.7 percent per person since the June quarter of 2022—the first months of the Albanese Labor government—according to the ABS.

Other data showed that most of this drop is occurring in essential spending, especially food, despite bargain hunting in mid-year sales. By contrast, expenditure on more up-market items, such as cosmetics, sports and recreational goods, grew by 6.3 percent year-on-year.

This is another indication of the widening social and class divide under the Labor government, accelerated by its $200 billion “Stage Three” income tax cuts, which are benefiting high-income households seven times more than low-income ones.

Other data indicated rising levels of mortgage stress, especially among new home buyers in low-income areas. The proportion of homes being resold within three years, mostly due to inability to make payments, jumped to 16 percent, the highest level in results that go back a decade.

There are growing numbers of car loan defaults, which are regarded as an advance warning of deeper financial problems. Westpac bank data showed 90-day-plus automative loan arrears are now about twice the rate of two years ago.

Even if the Reserve Bank of Australia holds off on another interest rate rise this week, 13 consecutive interest rate rises since May 2022 are having the effect intended by the central bank. Backed by the Labor government, the bank is inducing an economic slump that is driving job cuts and putting downward pressure on workers’ wages.

In per person terms, the economy has been in recession since the start of 2024. Production grew by just 0.1 percent during the first three months of the year. That is far less than inflation and population growth.

Figures for the June quarter, due early next month, are expected to be equally dire. Job cuts and business insolvencies are rising sharply. Among the latest job losses are those of at least 610 aviation workers at bankrupted airline Rex, just months after another airline operator, Bonza, collapsed destroying around 300 jobs.

Up to 300 jobs are to be cut at US-based lithium giant Albemarle’s Kemerton plant near Bunbury in Western Australia, adding to the thousands destroyed in the mining industry since the beginning of the year due to falling global prices for critical minerals and iron ore.

The previously government-owned telecommunications company, Telstra, is axing 2,800 jobs, or 9 percent of its remaining 30,000-strong workforce, by the end of 2024.

Statistics reported last week from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the corporate regulator, showed that business failures surged to a record high in the past financial year. There were 11,049 insolvencies, up about 40 percent on the previous year and 124 percent more than in 2021-22. That surpassed the previous high of 10,757 in 2011-12 during the fallout from the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

Cafes, restaurants, small retailers and accommodation providers were among the hardest hit this year. The prominent collapses included online book seller Booktopia, vacuum cleaner retailer Godfreys, transport group Scott’s Refrigerated Logistics, delivery service MilkRun, beauty and skincare group BWX and craft beer company Tribe Brewing.

Construction companies were the most affected. They made up more than a quarter of the corporate crashes, as hiked mortgage interest rates, inflation and surging costs of building materials took their toll.

Thousands of jobs and employer-sponsored apprenticeships are being axed, particularly in home building. Many trade apprentices such as electricians, carpenters and plumbers have their vocational training education tied to an employer, leaving young workers stranded when businesses go bust.

There were only 163,320 dwelling approvals in the 2023-24 financial year, the weakest result since 2011-12 according to ABS data. New home approvals are down by nearly 20 percent since the Reserve Bank started increasing interest rates in May 2022.

These results expose the fraud of the Labor government’s promise to alleviate the housing crisis by getting 1.2 million new homes built over the next five years, mostly by offering concessions to corporate property developers.

Overall, the figures provide an indication of the mounting effect of the global downturn and a dramatic cut in economic growth in China produced by US tariffs, sanctions and other economic warfare measures, which are undercutting Australian capitalism’s largest export market.

This has vast longer-term implications. Prices for iron ore, the biggest export item—previously generating revenues of $124 billion a year—have more than halved from over $US200 a tonne to under $100.

According to a report in Forbes, the business media outlet, an increase in world iron ore supply from next year, as the huge Simandou mine in the west African state of Guinea starts delivering ore, could drive the price down to around $80.

That could trigger a 49 percent fall in the earnings of Australian-based mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto and a 65 percent fall in the earnings of another significant Australian ore producer, Fortescue.

It would also slash tax intakes for already debt-ridden Australian federal and state governments. Western Australian iron ore producers alone are estimated to represent nearly 18 percent of the nationwide total tax revenue.

Prices for Australian-mined lithium, nickel and other strategic minerals are plummeting as well. Nickel prices have fallen by more than two-thirds, from a high of $US50,000 per metric ton in 2022 to about $16,500 recently.

Since early 2022, the price of a key rare earth, an oxide of neodymium and praseodymium, crucial for making powerful magnets, has dived from $145 a kilogram to $47.

The Albanese government is spending billions of dollars in subsidies and corporate aid to bolster critical minerals output, supposedly to make Australia a mining superpower. In reality, the government is seeking to assist US efforts to reduce reliance on supplies and refining in China, as part of the preparations for what would be a catastrophic US-instigated war against China.

While cutting spending in real terms on public health, education, housing and other vital social services, Albanese and his ministers are allocating hundreds of billions of dollars for AUKUS and other plans for war.

Workers and young people in Australia are already paying a heavy price for this program of war and austerity.

In July, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that real wages in Australia were still 4.8 percent lower than they were in the final quarter of 2019, just before the COVID pandemic—“one of the largest drops in real wages among OECD countries.”

This historic social crisis, on top of Labor’s support for the US-armed Israeli genocide in Gaza and US militarism against Russia and China, is intensifying the discrediting of the trade union-backed federal and state Labor governments in workers’ eyes.

If an election were held today, media polls suggest that Labor would be reduced to a minority government, relying on the support of not only the Greens but assorted independents. With a federal election due before May, Labor’s pro-genocide, pro-war and pro-business agenda could even pave the way for the widely-reviled Liberal-National Coalition to form a minority government.

Intel slashes 15,000 jobs as US unemployment rate jumps to 4.3 percent

Shannon Jones

President Joe Biden talks to Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, second from left, as Intel factory manager Hugh Green, Intel manufacturing technician Michelle Blackwell and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, left, listen, during a tour of the Intel Ocotillo Campus, in Chandler, Arizona Wednesday March 20, 2024. [AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin]

California-based chip maker Intel announced 15,000 job cuts, about 15 percent of its global workforce, in a week that saw signs of mounting global financial instability. The latest figures from the federal government showed US unemployment rose in July to 4.3 percent, sparking a sell-off on Wall Street.

The cuts at Intel are only the latest in a global offensive against jobs, particularly through the use of new labor-saving technologies. Intel plans to save $10 billion with the cuts as it faces stiff competition in the market for chips used in artificial intelligence. The cuts include a 24 percent reduction in capital spending as well as cuts to research and development and marketing.

In a statement announcing the cuts, CEO Pat Gelsinger wrote, “Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both – particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

Jerry White, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for US vice president, denounced the Intel job cuts in a post on X/Twitter:

The mass layoffs spreading through tech, auto, logistics and other industries are the result of a deliberate class policy. The threat of unemployment is being used to terrorize workers at Michigan Medicine, Boeing, Chicago Public Schools and throughout the economy, who want to fight for substantial wage improvements to protect their families against the ravages of inflation.

The ruling class, with the full backing of the Federal Reserve, the Biden administration and both corporate-controlled parties, is waging a class war against workers. It is being aided and abetted by the labor bureaucracy in the UAW, IAM and other unions, which is doing everything it can to prevent strikes and block resistance to job cutting. At the same, the union officials are going all out to put the pro-big business and pro-war candidate Kamala Harris in the White House.

Workers must respond by mapping out an independent course of action based on their own class interests. Against the ruling class program of war, austerity and dictatorship, the working class must advance a strategy of global unity against the capitalist profit system aimed at placing the banks, transport and industry under the democratic ownership and control of the working class.

This means expanding the network of rank-and-file committees to fight to defend every job. At the same time, workers throughout the world must unite to fight for socialism, so that great advances in technology like AI and automation can be used to shorten the work week and greatly increase the living standards of workers, not throw them into the unemployment lines.

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Manufacturing activity fell in July for the fourth straight month, as did trucking, which has seen the elimination of 30,000 jobs over the past 12 months.

This week carmaker Stellantis announced a new job buyout offer to salaried employees and said layoffs may be necessary if not enough workers take the offer. Stellantis and other US carmakers have already slashed thousands of production and white collar jobs this year in the aftermath of a sellout contract imposed by the United Auto Workers, with the support of the Biden White House. Farm and heavy equipment maker John Deere, whose factory workers are also in the UAW, has also announced mass layoffs.

Earlier this month, the United Parcel Service announced it was temporarily closing several hubs for retooling into automated facilities, employing a fraction of the labor. This is part of a nationwide restructuring effort, made possible by a sellout Teamsters contract last year, which will cost tens of thousands of jobs.

Job cuts are not limited to the private sector. The White House’ decision to end pandemic funding is forcing massive cuts in school districts across the United States, including major cities like Chicago and Detroit. Chicago alone is facing a $500 million shortfall while Michigan schools in addition to the loss to pandemic support face a $1 billion cut in state funding.

Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas reported that US employers announced 25,885 job cuts in July. While this was down from June, it was 9 percent higher than the same month in 2023 and the highest total for July since 2020, in the midst of the initial wave of the pandemic. The technology sector cut the most jobs in July with 6,009, for a total of 65,863 on the year.

Challenger reports, “For the year, employers have announced plans to hire 73,596 workers, the lowest year-to-date total since 2012, when 72,858 hiring plans were recorded.”

Other layoffs include:

• Disney is laying off 140 workers, or 3 percent of its Disney Entertainment Television workforce, including 13 percent of staff at National Geographic.
• Richmond, California-based SunPower Corporation said it is laying off 290 workers as it struggles with the threat of bankruptcy.
• Gaming company Bungie said it will lay off 220 employees, the latest layoffs in a string of cuts totaling 11,000 across the gaming industry so far this year.

The rise in US unemployment from 4.1 percent to 4.3 percent last month was higher than what analysts expected. The economy created just 110,000 new jobs last month, while the number of unemployed people rose by 352,000 to 7.2 million and the number of new weekly filings for unemployment benefits rose to its highest level in a year. The BLS also revised downward its figures for May and June by 29,000 jobs.

The actual number of unemployed is much higher, with millions more forced to work part time or having given up the search for jobs altogether.

The monthly jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed wage growth slowing as well. Wages have risen just 3.6 percent over the last 12 months, barely about the 3.0 percent rise in the Consumer Price Index, which underestimates in the impact of rising prices on workers.

The Washington Post wrote, “With the unemployment rate now at the highest rate since coming out of the pandemic downturn in 2021, economists, banking analysts and investors warned that recession signals are flashing.”

Global stocks were down sharply on Thursday in response to the jobs data, reflecting fears of a looming recession. The Dow Jones lost 600 points, the S&P 500 was down 1.5 percent and the tech heavy NASDAQ down 2.5 percent. Intel, which is a component of the Dow, shares were down a massive 26 percent. The Japanese Nikkei 225 index also crashed 5.8 percent Friday. US stock losses continued Friday, with the DOW down another 600 points and the NASDAQ down 10 percent from its recent high.

One of the signs at Intel's manufacturing campus in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. [AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan]

But the steady rise in unemployment is the consequence of deliberate policies from the White House aimed at smashing the growth of the class struggle through mass job cuts. The Federal Reserve has pushed interest rates to the highest level in more than 40 years while Biden, the self-described “most pro-union president in American history,” is working with the union bureaucracy to impose massive sellouts and prepare for war.

In response to the jobs report, Biden issued a complacent statement totally at odds with reality.

Today's report shows employment is growing more gradually at a time when inflation has declined significantly. Business investment remains strong thanks in part to our investing in America agenda, which is creating good-paying jobs in communities that have been left behind.

While heightened interest rates are aimed at boosting profits through attacks on the working class, this policy also contains immense dangers for the world financial system, which has become completely dependent on cheap money. While current interest rates are not high by historical standards, the fall in share values reflects concern that if rates do not come down soon, it could trigger a recession.

The Federal Reserve has signaled that it intends to begin incremental rate cuts as soon as its September board meeting. But there are concerns that the Federal Reserve has already waited too long to being reducing rates.

Democratic Senator and former banking regulator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts tweeted, “Fed Chair [Jerome] Powell made a serious mistake not cutting interest rates. He’s been warned over and over again that waiting too long risks driving the economy into a ditch.” Warren and the Democrats are also worried about the potential impact of a sudden economic downturn on the November elections.

733 million of the world’s people faced hunger in 2023

Jean Shaoul

According to the latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, a staggering 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in eleven people globally and one in five in Africa.

Global hunger levels have remained the same for three consecutive years and are running at around 152 million more than in 2019.

That so many people are unable to feed themselves in the third decade of the 21st century, amid unprecedented scientific and technological developments in food production and distribution, is a searing indictment of the capitalist system.

The annual report was published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the UN World Food Programme (WFP), and the World Health Organization (WHO). These agencies are part of the international order set up in the aftermath of World War II to enforce the peace; they act as pillars of support for the predatory aims of the US and other imperialist powers. Their focus is therefore on the financial “solutions” that will best enrich the banks and global food corporations.

The UN agencies launched the report in the context of the G20 Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty Task Force Ministerial Meeting that took place in Brazil on July 24, with the official launch of the alliance set to take place at the same time as the leaders of the world’s 20 richest nations meet for the G20 Summit in November 2024. It points to the way that hunger, poverty and malnutrition are seen as business opportunities dressed up as philanthropy, humanitarianism and social concern.

Children eat porridge prepared at a feeding center in Mudzi, Zimbabwe, on July 2, 2024. In Zimbabwe, an El Nino-induced drought is affecting millions of people, and children are most at risk. [AP Photo/Aaron Ufumeli]

While Asia is home to more than half the world’s hungry people, the worst conditions exist in Africa, where the percentage of people facing hunger continues to rise (to 20.4 percent). In 2023, 384.5 million people in Asia faced hunger, compared with 298.4 million in Africa. From 2022 to 2023, hunger increased in Western Asia, the Caribbean, and most sub-regions of Africa.

The report goes beyond the issue of hunger, drawing attention to widespread food insecurity and malnutrition.

In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a sharp uptick in the numbers of people facing moderate or severe food insecurity, especially in Africa where 58 percent of the population is moderately or severely food insecure. Four years later, the overall number has not changed significantly, hovering around 2.33 billion, or 29 percent of the world’s 8.1 billion population. Over 864 million people experienced severe food insecurity, going without food for an entire day or more at times

Levels of undernourishment, far from falling, have risen to levels comparable to those in 2008-09. What the report omitted to say was that more than one billion went hungry then as food prices soared thanks to hoarding by the food trading corporations, hedge fund speculation and the criminal activities of the financial institutions in 2007-08. It led to people dying of starvation and food riots and social unrest in both poor and advanced nations, bringing down the Haitian government and contributing to the 2011 Arab Spring.

The report warns that if current trends continue, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half in Africa. These figures put paid to any notion of achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, Zero Hunger, by 2030. The Zero Hunger Goal, established in 2015, was supposed to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.”

Malnutrition and a healthy diet go beyond the issue of food insecurity, as the report points out, affecting over one-third of the global population. Using new food price data and methodologies, it reveals that more than 2.8 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2022, particularly in low-income countries, where 71.5 percent of the population cannot afford a healthy diet, compared to 6.3 percent in high-income countries. This increased substantially in Africa, while dropping below pre-pandemic levels elsewhere.

A recent report on the diets of under-fives from the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF found that one young child in four globally has a diet so restricted it is likely to harm their growth, brain development and chances of survival. Many of the children live in UN-designated “hunger hotspots” such as Palestine, Haiti and Mali, where it expects access to food to deteriorate over the coming months. An estimated 181 million children from almost 100 countries were consuming, at most, only two food groups on a daily basis—typically milk with a starchy food such as rice, maize or wheat.

The SOFI report points to the co-existence of undernutrition alongside overweight and obesity that has surged across all age groups. While thinness and underweight have declined over the last 20 years, obesity—which increases the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and cancer—has risen, with levels of adult obesity rising from 12.1 percent in 2012 to 15.8 percent in 2022. This is projected to rise to 1.2 billion by 2030.

Overweight and obesity have risen because of the huge increase in the production and consumption of processed and ultra-processed foods containing high levels of salt, saturated fats and/or preservatives, and of sugar-sweetened beverages, distributed through supermarkets and local convenience stores, many of which sell little else. This is not just increasing in urban areas but also in Africa’s rural areas, driven, among other things, by mechanization of farm production and higher incomes from non-farm employment, along with longer working hours and travel time that puts a premium on convenience foods.

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) cited research showing that the rising demand for processed foods has come on the back of the rapid expansion of the food processing and modern distribution and packaging systems in the food supply chains, encompassing both small-and medium enterprises (SMEs) and the giant food companies.

The large food corporations have invested in highly automated food processing factories in Africa and elsewhere, with Indonesia’s Indofood manufacturing package snacks and ready-to-eat products like Indomie ramen noodles in Nigeria.

The SMEs involved in the processing, wholesale, transportation and retail food supply chain employ an estimated 20 percent of the rural and 25 percent of the urban workforces in Africa. Many African countries face strong opposition from large food companies with strong market power to any attempts to impose sugar taxes, the labelling of unhealthy foods and the bans on the distribution of unhealthy foods in schools to reduce demand for unhealthy ultra-processed foods.

The SOFI report has little if anything to say about the impact of the Gulf states’ land and water grabbing activities in the Horn of Africa in search of food supplies for their burgeoning populations. For example, much of Sudan’s most fertile region—the states of Khartoum, River Nile and Northern that once sustained indigenous farmers—has been bought up, particularly after the 2008 food crisis and 2013 introduction of business-friendly legislation. Land has been turned over to highly mechanised food production for export, often via agreements with agribusiness companies such as the US firm Cargill.

In other regions in the Horn and East Africa dominated by agro-pastoral subsistence economies, changes in the ownership, rearing and export of livestock have led to violent land clearances and the militarisation of livestock rearing for a rapidly expanding export market, as well as to the displacement and destitution of the local people who are often forced to live in edge-of-city shanty towns or giant internally displaced peoples’ camps that are little more than bonded-labour camps. In Sudan, ethnic and tribal rivalries exacerbated by militarised livestock production may have played a role in the ongoing intra-military civil war in Darfur and Kordofan.

The UN agencies’ report explains that food insecurity and malnutrition are worsening due to food price inflation, and conflicts, climate change and economic downturns becoming more frequent and severe. None of this is explained in concrete terms that set out the economic processes, the activities of the giant food corporations and traders, the role of the multilateral organisations acting under the umbrella of the UN and the complicity of pliant governments. Much less do they identify the (few) financial winners and (many) losers.

German government wants to cut welfare payments by 5.55 billion euros

Marianne Arens

A pro-war policy inevitably goes hand in hand with attacks on social rights. In the 2025 federal budget, Germany’s coalition government is planning to cut the “citizen’s income” welfare payments by a total of €5.55 billion or almost 11 percent.

Queue in front of a food bank in Frankfurt-Höchst

Instead of €50.5 billion this year, Finance Minister Christian Lindner (Liberal Democrat, FDP) only wants to spend €44.95 billion on social welfare next year. In a summer interview with broadcaster ARD, he said he would not be in favour of any further redistribution or tax increases, but that there would be an “ambitious structural reform and a growth-friendly policy.”

Lindner insulted welfare recipients as “free riders” and threatened them with “new sanctions and reporting obligations, new waiting-time regulations.” In January 2025, he announced a “zero round” (i.e., benefits freeze) for all recipients of the citizen’s allowance, denying them the usual annual adjustment of their payments in line with constantly rising prices.

In order to achieve the savings target of €5.55 billion, the government—a coalition of the Social Democrats (SPD), Liberal Democrats and Greens—wants as many people as possible who receive citizen’s benefit to join the large and growing army of low-wage workers. Hundreds of thousands are to be forced to accept any job, no matter how bad.

According to the Ministry of Labour, every 100,000 recipients of the citizen’s allowance cost the state around €780 million a year. This means that saving €5.55 billion would require forcing over 700,000 (!) people in need into work. This would affect almost one in five of the current 3.9 million adult recipients of citizen’s allowance.

The last time such a high number was registered was in 2007, after the introduction of the Hartz IV “reforms,” when the Social Democratic-Green coalition government under Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer sealed the end of the welfare state.

Significantly, the goal now is not to be achieved (as promised by the coalition last year) through higher subsidies for further training, retraining and necessary procurement to make it easier to find work. On the contrary, the job centres, which are responsible for the citizen’s income, will also see massive cuts next year: €1.6 billion is to be cut from the job centres and €900 million from further vocational training and rehabilitation benefits.

As the WSWS has already stated, the budget for 2025 is “a war budget dictated by big business, and the working class will be made to pay for it”:

Over €53 billion has been earmarked for the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) and rearmament and billions more for domestic security, while—as Lindner boasts—it adheres to the debt brake. At the same time, the overall budget, which has been reduced by almost €8 billion, will cut the “citizen’s allowance” (welfare payments) and postpone the promised basic child protection allowance to the distant future, while the child benefit will be raised by just €5 (!).

From the outset, the WSWS has pointed out that the 2025 federal budget is an austerity and war budget that is to be tightened even further. The major media outlets now take this for granted.

In the interview with Lindner, the presenter’s very first question to the finance minister was: “How do you explain to the soldiers that the Defence Minister and the Bundeswehr are not receiving the funding they requested, but five billion less?” To which Lindner replied that after all, it was he, who, as Finance Minister under SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz, initiated the 100 billion euro “special fund for the Bundeswehr.”

In fact, the defence budget in Germany has been increasing more than in almost any other country for several years. This year, the government is spending a total of up to €90 billion on weapons, ammunition and fueling the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

In order to meet NATO’s military spending target of 2 percent of GDP, the government has already decided to increase the defence budget by almost €30 billion to around €80 billion in 2028. At the NATO summit in Washington, Scholz and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD) recently promised to station long-range weapons on German soil again. This was previously unthinkable due to the mass protests of the 1980s, and entails a huge risk of nuclear war.

The working class and, first and foremost, its most vulnerable section, the recipients of citizen’s income welfare payments, are to pay for this. They should either work or starve to death, as is being said more and more frequently.

Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Secretary General Carsten Linnemann has also recently called for those who “refuse to work” to be completely deprived of the citizen’s income. He could imagine this affecting “a six-figure number of people.” Related voices are also being raised in the SPD. Hubertus Heil, who heads the Ministry of Labour, already announced in May that he would completely cancel the benefits of recipients of the citizen’s allowance for two months if they were caught working illegally.

The attacks come at a time of extreme social polarisation. For the super-rich, 2023, the year of inflation, meant a great orgy of enrichment, as the Global Health Report revealed. According to this, Germany now has 2.8 million millionaires, four times as many as 20 years ago, placing it in sixth place in the world’s millionaire rankings. As far as the super-super-rich are concerned—so-called “ultra-high net worth individuals” in financial jargon—Germany is in third place behind the US and China, despite having a much smaller population. The ranks of the 3,000 super-rich in Germany were joined by 300 more last year.

Finance Minister Lindner is guaranteeing them all that there will be no tax increases; after all, he is one of them himself. Two years ago, the finance minister’s three-day luxury wedding on the island of Sylt became infamous when taxpayers had to pay for the entire personal security of the invited politicians and the official vehicles.

Today, Lindner is pointing the finger at the recipients of the citizen’s allowance. In the ARD interview, he arrogantly threatened: “We will have to talk about our welfare state... Anyone who doesn’t work, who deliberately turns down [job] offers or who is staying in Germany irregularly, illegally and actually has to leave the country, these people cannot live off our welfare state.”

Even now, the citizen’s income is barely a pittance, although the long-term unemployed, the needy and people in precarious living situations have a constitutionally guaranteed right to it.

The citizen’s income currently amounts to €563 per month for single people and €502 for people living with a partner. This is less than the cost of a single overnight stay in a luxury hotel on Sylt or a single dinner in a top restaurant or a golfing or sailing trip. Citizen’s income recipients have to cover all their living costs except for housing for 30 days from the meagre amount they receive—an almost impossible endeavour.

Lindner is deliberately fueling resentment against immigrants and refugees in order to divide the working class. He said, “We don’t have too little money, we have too much. ... We have sharply rising social security contributions; this is also linked to irregular immigration to Germany since 2015.” For Linder, it is immigrants, not the super-rich parasites, who are therefore to blame for the fact that the welfare state needs to be “reorganised.”

This all makes clear how much the coalition government’s policies are paving the way for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), especially in view of the upcoming state elections in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg. The federal government knows that it is sitting on a powder keg.

WHO warns Gaza children facing immediate threat of polio

Benjamin Mateus

The director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Wednesday that polio had been detected in Gaza and warned that urgent preventive measures had to be taken to protect children from the infection, which can cause death or crippling paralysis.

A boy sitting amongst rubble in Yarmouk Sports Stadium Friday, July 5, 2024 in Gaza City [AP Photo/AP Photo]

“The detection of polio in Gaza is another reminder of the dire conditions the population is facing,” the WHO director wrote on X, referring to the Israeli military onslaught on the Palestinian enclave. “The persistence of the conflict hampers efforts to identify and respond to preventable threats such as polio.”

The WHO has dispatched a million doses of polio vaccine to the Israeli-occupied territory, but how they will reach the population, particularly the children, under conditions of continuous military violence is unknown.

The Gaza Health Ministry declared a polio epidemic Monday based on testing of wastewater samples. No actual cases have yet been reported, but the chaotic conditions in Gaza, with constant bombing and shelling and forced movements of population make any systematic monitoring for the disease impossible.

In a statement posted on Telegram, the ministry warned that polio “poses a health threat to the residents of Gaza and neighboring countries,” referring to both Israel and Egypt, the two countries which border on the Gaza Strip, as well as the wider Middle East.

Gaza has been polio-free for a quarter of a century, thanks to effective mass vaccination, but this health achievement, like all the social gains of the Palestinians, is threatened with utter destruction under the impact of Israeli bombs, missiles and tank shells.

Miles of tents line the beaches and empty lots and fields, people are piled into tents in clothes that have not been washed for months, children are playing in and drinking from puddles of water contaminated with sewage. 

The primary means of spread for polio is fecal-oral contamination, and the targeting of water and sanitary facilities by the Israel Defense Forces has as a conscious aim the spreading of infectious disease to decimate the Palestinian population. 

Repeatedly during the ongoing genocide, health authorities had warned that the destruction of critical infrastructure would bring with it a public health crisis. And last week, six of seven routine sewage samples detected the virus.

The UN noted that besides polio, diseases like Hepatitis A, dysentery, and other gastrointestinal disorders are widespread and continue to rise. More than one million respiratory infections have been documented. Scabies and lice are running rampant among the population. And as many have noted, this is only the beginning of the broader public health crisis that the exhausted and trodden population will see adding to their historic misery. 

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician, speaking with Al-Jazeera, called the detection of polio a “ticking time bomb.” She added, “Normally if you have a case of polio, you’re going to isolate them, you’re going to make sure that they use a bathroom that nobody else uses, make sure that they’re not in close proximity to other people, [but] that’s impossible. You have everybody clustering in refugee camps at the moment without vaccines for at least the past nine months, including children who would otherwise have been vaccinated for polio and adults who, in the setting of an outbreak, should receive a booster, including healthcare workers.”

Dr. Medhat Abbas, director general of Al Shifa Medical Complex, told the press that the streets were full of sewage. “Personal hygiene is absent. You can’t wash your hands, even after you’ve used the bathroom,” he said. “So, there’s pollution and this disease is spread through feces.”

In May, Oxfam’s Middle East director, Sally Abi Khalil, lamented, “The situation is desperate, with so many people in Gaza living in fear and being forced to endure inhumane and unsanitary conditions caused by sustained Israeli bombardment. One colleague told me there was so much human waste in the streets, it literally smelt like disease.”

She said at that time: “Israel’s military assault on Rafah could be devastating, not only because of the risk of mass civilian casualties, but also the repercussions of vast numbers of people being forced to move. With the infrastructure already beyond breaking point, little or no healthcare available, and widespread malnutrition this could quickly escalate into a major epidemic.”

This week, Dr. Ayadil Saparbekov, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) health emergency team lead for Gaza and the West Bank, told NPR, “It’s a very dangerous disease. And, in the situation of Gaza, it’s beyond dangerous.” The limited investigation indicates the virus came from Egypt sometime in September before the commencement of hostilities. 

Another important element in the policy of extermination through disease is the blockade-imposed famine, which starves some victims to death and weakens the resistance to infection among many more. 

This is combined with the military offensive on hospitals, clinics, and healthcare workers that has killed 500 physicians, 50 of them specialists. More than 200 medical staff have been imprisoned in detainee camps in Southern Israel where they undergo violent interrogations. Twenty of 36 hospitals have been completely destroyed and the rest are functioning under most barbaric conditions. The sick and injured have no place to turn to address any of their immediate and life-threatening injuries and illnesses. 

In response to the reports of polio, Israel said it was offering soldiers serving in the Gaza Strip the polio vaccine to be administered during routine troop turnover, although it was not mandatory for them to accept it. The Israeli army also indicated it would allow international groups to bring the polio vaccine into the enclave. According to the WHO, more than a million polio vaccine doses were being brought in to be given over the coming weeks. 

Even before the military assault on the defenseless enclave, in March 2023, Israeli physicians were urging the government and medical community to respond to an outbreak of polio and prioritize and vaccinate the 176,000 Israeli children who had never received any doses. At the time, four children had been diagnosed with polio, and one had paralysis in his limbs. Prior to that outbreak, Israel had no clinical cases of polio between 1988 and 2022.

Israel’s US-backed rampage across the Middle East threatens to ignite region-wide war

Keith Jones

With Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza now in its tenth month, the Netanyahu regime and its US imperialist paymasters and arms providers are relentlessly pushing the Middle East over the precipice and into the abyss of an all-out regional war.

In what was simultaneously a calculated provocation and an act of extreme recklessness, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas’s political wing, in Iran’s capital early Wednesday morning.

Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh speaks during a press briefing after his meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian in Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, March 26, 2024. [AP Photo/Vahid Salemi]

Haniyeh, who was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, was killed along with his bodyguard when a guided missile, said by Iranian authorities to have been launched from outside the country, hit the compound where he was staying.

Only hours before this brazen act of criminality, Israeli drones demolished a five-story building in a heavily populated area of Beirut. Described by the Israeli government as “targeted,” the drone strike killed five and injured scores of other residents of the apartment block. The five fatalities included Fuad Shukr, said to be the right-hand man of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and two children aged 10 and 6.

The Gaza-born 62 year-old Haniyeh was Hamas’s chief negotiator in the protracted, on-again off-again Gaza war peace negotiations.

“How can mediation succeed when one party assassinates the negotiator on other side?” asked Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, who has hosted the peace negotiations, in a post on X.

The reality is the negotiations have been a Biden-Harris administration-orchestrated sham. Israel, with the full support of the US, Canada and the European imperialist powers, has used them as a smokescreen for its continuing prosecution, through mass murder, ethnic cleansing and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, of a “final solution” to the Palestinian question.

Haniyeh’s summary execution was a war crime. That it was carried out on Iranian soil and amid the ceremonies marking the assumption of office by a new president, Masoud Pezeshkian, adds a further explosive dimension of criminality and provocation.

The Israeli strike was aimed at humiliating Iran, destabilizing its leadership, undermining confidence in its security forces and, last but not least, forcing it to respond, providing Israel with a pretext for still more aggression. Just hours before his death, Haniyeh had met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

For an Israeli government that is pursuing genocide and is responsible—according to The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals—for at least 186,000 deaths during the Gaza War, there are truly no limits. Still, the execution of Haniyeh, who for the last seven years had headed Hamas’s Politburo and prior to that led the civil administration in Gaza, represents a new level of lawlessness and brutality in international relations. By way of comparison, Israel’s murder by missile strike of the head of Hamas’s political wing would be akin to Russia using a drone to kill Ukrainian President Zelensky when he was visiting Washington or Berlin.

In the imperialist capitals, this is no cause for even a quiver of embarrassment. Their universal response to the Israeli strikes in Tehran and Beirut has been to threaten Iran and Hezbollah and reaffirm their unflinching commitment to Israeli “self-defence.”

As is now a familiar pattern after every Israeli escalation, there has been a flurry of statements from Washington, London, Berlin and Paris that blame Iran and its allies for the growing threat of a wider war and demand they stand down. “Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel must stop,” exclaimed German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. “It is important to prevent a regional conflagration.”

US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert Wood, in an emergency Security Council session Wednesday afternoon, declared: “We call on the Security Council to send an unambiguous message to Hezbollah by standing with Israel as it defends itself against Hezbollah’s repeated attacks.”

Continuing in the same vein, Wood demanded the Security Council take actions, including possibly new sanctions, to “hold Iran accountable and address repeated action by its terrorist proxies.”

Earlier Wednesday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed the US was “not aware of or involved in” the Israeli assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran. Even if one were to accept that Tel Aviv did not share the operational details, Washington’s hands are smeared with the blood of this crime.

Blinken, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and other White House officials have been publicly urging Israel to make greater use of “targeted” assassinations against Hamas and its allies. Moreover, even amid the so-called “peace negotiations,” Washington has been pressing Qatar to expel the Hamas leadership in exile.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has issued an ominously worded statement preparing the population for an expansion of the war. “Citizens of Israel,” he declared, “challenging days lie ahead. Since the strike in Beirut there are threats sounding from all directions We are prepared for any scenario [and] will exact a heavy price for any aggression.”

Since Netanyahu’s visit to Washington last week, which included meetings with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, Israel has gone on a rampage. In addition to the attacks on Beirut and Tehran, Israel has carried out strikes in southern Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. On July 20, it struck Yemen’s port of Hodeida, which is under the control of the Houthi insurgency.

The timing of Israel’s escalation of the war makes clear that the expansion of the Gaza genocide into a major regional conflict was greenlighted by Washington during Netanyahu’s visit. At the key public event of his trip, his July 24 address to a joint session of Congress, the Israeli prime minister centered much of his remarks on bellicose denunciations of Iran.

Turning reality on its head, he painted Tehran as the aggressor, just as he grotesquely claimed there have been almost no civilian casualties in Gaza. To boisterous applause, Netanyahu declared that in fighting Iran and its allies, Israel was waging America’s fight and that Israel deserved Washington’s unstinting support in using genocidal methods and otherwise shredding international law. “If Israel’s hands are tied,” he declared, “America is next.”

Exactly how the war will develop in the coming days and weeks cannot be said with any certainty. What is incontestable is that the crisis of the Israeli regime and its imperialist backers, above all, Washington, and the logic of the war they have initiated—the predatory aims they are pursuing and the escalating violence and recklessness with which they are seeking to realize them—lead inexorably to a region-wide Mideast war, with the US joining in the assault on Iran and its allies.

Such a war could rapidly draw in a host of regional and great powers and threaten to ignite a global conflagration. At issue would be the fate of the region that is the world’s largest exporter of oil, and that, because of its location at the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa, is of enormous geo-strategic importance.

The imperialist powers, led by the US, have backed Israel to the hilt in its genocide for they see the Gaza war as a first step to realizing their plans for the establishment of unbridled imperialist domination over the Middle East. Moreover, as Biden and Blinken have themselves made clear, the war they are prosecuting alongside Israel is only one front in a developing global war. Securing domination over the Middle East is viewed as critical to subjugating Russia, with which the US and NATO powers are already at war, and prevailing in what is an all-sided military-strategic and economic offensive against China.