The EU-ECOWAS Scholarship programme provides scholarships for masters’ degrees in the sustainable energy sector at specialised universities in West Africa (Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo) for the benefit of eligible students from ECOWAS member states involved in the energy sector.
The programme aims to improve access to high-quality training in the sustainable energy sector in West Africa, enabling university graduates with a focus on young professionals (English, French and Portuguese speaking) in the ECOWAS member states to acquire the profile required to meet the growing demand for specialists at the highest level in the field of sustainable energy and to promote good governance of the sector in the region.
What Type of Award is this?
Scholarship
How are Applicants Selected?
The EU-ECOWAS Scholarship application form collects responses from applicants who are interested to complete a master’s programme in the energy sector from shortlisted universities. The scholarship selection process will analyse the information collected through the application form against the following criteria:
Be nationals of a member state of ECOWAS or Mauritania and being resident in ECOWAS’ region or Mauritania
Have at least a bachelor’s degree with First Class or Second Class (Upper Division)
Have undertaken studies at least at bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, energy and environment (including renewable energy and energy efficiency), law, economics, finance and planning as deemed by the entry requirements of the chosen university
Work experience in the energy sector in West Africa will be an added advantage
Hold (at least) provisional admission into an approved course of study at the time of scholarship approval
Scholarship is open to working and non-working candidates. Working candidates are required to provide letter of release from their employer to complete the course for the duration of the programme
Commitment to publish at least 1 practice-oriented research before the end of the programme
Commitment to start internships within the course of study.
Female candidates are strongly encouraged to apply. If more candidates match the selection criteria than there are places available, they will be ranked according to the results of their last year of study and professional experience.
Which Countries are Eligible?
African countries
How Many Positions will be Given?
Not specified
What is the Benefit of Award?
The two types of scholarships available on the programme are:
Mobile Scholarships;
Scholars are selected to complete their master’s program in higher education institutions located outside their country of residence. The scholarship will provide funding for tuition, subsistence, travel, research grant, insurance and visa.
Stationary Scholarships;
Scholars are selected to complete their master’s program in higher education institutions located in their country of residence. The scholarship will take care of scholars’ tuition and research grant. A small stipend to contribute towards travel and subsistence will also be provided.
Scholarships will be awarded on a limited number of best qualifying people, to meet budget restrictions. Applicants are encouraged to consider factors such as language, proximity, family, and opportunities for internship in your decision making when selecting your most preferred scholarship category.
After 12 bleak years of various Conservative governments, led by inadequate Prime Ministers, the UK is on its knees. Democracy is under attack like never before; the disaster of Brexit, which has resulted in a catalogue of negatives including social polarization, isolationism and rabid tribalism.
Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, and, as they are in office, the new Prime Minister. A totally undemocratic electoral process, but hey, ‘that’s the way it’s always been’.
She was voted in, in a country of around 69 million people, by 81,326 (57.4% of the total gaggle) Conservative members. A tiny group, overwhelmingly old, posh, white, male, anti-Europe, anti-immigrant, anti-environment – pro-fossil fuels, backward-looking nationalists. A crazy bunch operating within a dysfunctional system that, like much of the UK parliamentary structure and the primordial electoral model, desperately needs reforming.
The revolting campaign rhetoric spouted by Truss, was we hoped, just that, ranting rhetoric aimed solely at the conservative golf club nobs. Alas, in her first pronouncements as PM, surrounded by baying Tory sycophants, it was clear that Truss lives not in the real world at all, but in a crumbling castle for one, built on a foundation of Neo-Liberal doctrine, situated further to the right than any UK Prime-Minister in recent years.
Despite decades of disappointment, whenever a new PM/government takes office, naivety gives rise to a prickle of optimism: surely now things will improve, surely social justice will be prioritized, peace and environmental action imperatives. Well, PM Truss swiftly crushed any such childish hopes with her first speech in parliament and her wooden responses during Prime Minister’s Questions. Arrogance masquerading as certainty imbued every cruel statement of policy intent, and, as opposition parties shook their heads in disbelief, people around the country, millions of whom are struggling to pay rising energy bills and increased food prices, were again crushed.
Truss, her cabinet, and thanks to a purge of moderate voices undertaken by Boris Johnson to quieten dissent, most, if not all of the parliamentary party, is now firmly wedded to an extreme version of Neo-Liberalism and the failed doctrine of Trickle Down economics. After forty years of most boats being sunk by the rising tide, the Ideology of Injustice has been shown to deepen inequality, intensify poverty and further concentrate wealth in the pockets of The Already Wealthy.
In addition to economic plans designed to benefit corporations and, by her own admission, intensify inequality (‘I’m not interested in re-distribution’ she told the BBC), she plans to increase military spending, allow global energy companies to restart gas extraction in the North Sea, end the moratorium on fracking and abolish green levies, which are used to fund energy efficiency and renewable electricity. She despises labor rights and the Trades Union movement, peaceful public protest and immigrants, all of which she is threatening to criminalize or clutter with so much bureaucracy as to make such human rights unenforceable.
Her policies, dogmatism and the doctrine that underpin them are, in many ways, terrifying. And with the suspension of parliament and consequently, any form of scrutiny, resulting from the death of The Queen, there is a danger, or for her, an opportunity, that she attempts to introduce legislation under cover of national mourning. If Truss and her gang get their way, the limited form of democracy that exists in the UK will become a distant memory, rather as ethics and honesty in public office, compassion and honoring international commitments have in recent years.
Rising misery
The list of national crises that the Truss government inherits, most if not all of which she had a grubby hand in causing, is long, and growing. As is public anger. It is a list resulting from ideological obsession, gross incompetence and absenteeism.
The National Health Service (NHS) is in crisis – years of underfunding, lack of training and Brexit, which saw thousands of NHS workers from Europe leave the UK, have led to around 135,000 vacancies, including 40,000 nurses and over 8,000 doctors in England alone. The service has the longest waiting lists for routine treatments on record; if you dial 999 for and ambulance, it could be hours, or in extreme cases days before it arrives. Social care is dysfunctional; there is a housing crisis, property prices are sky high, rents are unaffordable, tenancies offer no security homelessness is increasing – according to Government figures, “between January to March 2022, 74,230 households were assessed as homeless or threatened with homelessness,” up 5.4% in the same period in 2021, a further 38,000 were regarded as at “risk of homelessness”.
Inflation is at 10.1% and rising, recession predicted, poverty booming. Thousands of people/families (many of whom are in full-time employment) rely on food banks for basic supplies – over two million people visited a food bank last year, and this doesn’t include independent providers – local charities, churches etc. Ten years ago food banks barely existed in the UK, now there are estimated to be 2,572, and constitute a growth area.
The privatization of utility companies including water in 1989 under Thatcher, has led to energy and water companies making huge profits for shareholders (£72bn in dividends), but neglecting consumers and failing to invest. Since water was privatized no new reservoirs have been commissioned (in 33 years), and, The Guardian reports,“2.4bn liters [of water] a day on current estimates have been allowed to leak away.” Airports including Heathrow, have had to limit the number of flights due to lack of staff; the airport authorities and airlines use the ‘It’s not us it’s Covid’ excuse, so loved by companies and government agencies who laid off too many employees during the pandemic and either haven’t re-hired enough, or employees refused to return unless wages and conditions improved.
The judiciary is in crisis, as is the prison system and the police, particularly in London; childcare and nursery education is shambolic, unaffordable for most, hard to find, limited places, particularly for those on average incomes; again due in part to lack of properly trained staff. It is, it seems an endless list, shameful and intensely depressing, There may however be a glimmer of light within the storm; a positive effect of this cacophony of chaos is a growing movement of resistance to economic injustice, and Trades Union industrial action.
Enough is Enough
Wages for most people in the UK have been effectively frozen for years; and now, with rising inflation income is reducing in value, economic hardship intensifying, fury rising. Unions, which have been greatly weakened in the last thirty years through restrictive legislation have rediscovered their courage and purpose, and in response to members demands have organised strikes in a number of areas. Most notably, railway and Transport for London workers have withdrawn their labor on a number of occasions in disputes over pay and conditions; refuse workers in Scotland have been on strike over pay; postal workers have also been striking; junior barristers are on indefinite strike over pay; workers at the UK’s largest container port, Felixstowe recently withdrew their labour for eight days in another dispute about pay. Nurses and doctors working in the NHS are threatening industrial action, as are teachers.
The leader of the RMT union, Mick Lynch, who has emerged as a leading voice for the people, has suggested that, “unions are on the brink of calling for ‘synchronized’ strikes over widespread anger at how much soaring inflation is outpacing wages.” If such a positive step were taken it would be a powerful act of resistance against years of exploitation and injustice, and may further empower working people, who for years have been silenced.
In parallel with the workers revolt is a social movement of defiance. Initially triggered by high energy bills, rising costs and low wages, the scope of disquiet is expanding to include outrage at huge profits for energy companies and other corporations, increasing payments to shareholders whilst the majority struggle to feed themselves and their families, i.e. its about social injustice, exploitation and greed. Two movements of resistance and change have emerged from the widespread disquiet – ‘Don’t Pay’, which aims to empower people to not pay increased energy bills, and ‘Enough is Enough’, which is a broader social movement founded by union leaders and MPs.
The appearance of these groups is deeply encouraging and could prove to be a pivotal moment. Many people, the majority perhaps, are worn down, ashamed of where the country fins itself, and have had enough. Enough of being ignored and manipulated; of being told to ‘tighten their belts’ and ‘carry on’, whilst corporations, public/private companies including energy firms, pay out huge dividends and government ministers, spineless, unprincipled puppets, who live in the silk-lined pockets of big business, including most notably the media barons, lie and lie and lie again.
In the face of increasing levels of social injustice, government duplicity and economic hardship, eventually the people must unite and revolt. If after the endless pantomime of the Queen’s funeral people do come together, refuse to pay rising energy costs; refuse to work, refuse to be exploited and marginalized; refuse to stand by while the natural world is vandalised; if the unions do take coordinated action, and many of us would support such a progressive act, there is a chance, slim, but real, that years of frustration and anger, can be turned into empowerment and hope.
The Auckland University of Technology (AUT), in New Zealand’s biggest city, has announced that over 230 jobs will be axed after a review of courses with low enrolments. About 150 full-time equivalent academic and 80 general professional staff positions will go, but counting part-timers the numbers will be much more. Administration and support roles have also been targeted.
Vice-chancellor Damon Salesa said costs had increased and international student numbers significantly reduced. There are also fewer domestic students because school leavers are choosing to work instead of study, doubtless due to the deteriorating economic climate.
Entrance to AUT South Campus [Photo by PlanningAUT]
Salesa told Radio NZ (RNZ): “We expect those challenges to continue into 2023 and beyond so it's not just the short-term challenge that we're facing, it’s clearly in the middle term and some of these changes have been evident from before COVID.” It will take years to rebuild foreign student enrolments and it is unlikely they would return to pre-COVID levels, Salesa said.
AUT has 4,354 staff and predicts a decline of at least 1,100 students. Salesa claimed AUT had “protected staff” during the COVID pandemic while other universities made cuts but would now reduce spending by $NZ21 million a year. AUT made a $12.8 million surplus last year, almost double the $6.8 million forecast.
The programmes being disestablished include Bachelor of Arts (BA) degrees in Social Sciences, Conflict Resolution, Japanese Studies, Chinese Studies and Asian Studies, English and New Media, a Language teaching minor and a certificate in Science and Technology. Under review are “non-core” activities including an early childhood centre, drone lab, and a textile design lab.
Prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic international students, who pay much higher, unsubsidised fees, were used as cash cows to prop up the universities. Foreign student numbers fell from 28,150 in 2019 to 21,510 in 2020 and to 14,440 in 2021. Income from fees fell from $579.7 million in 2019 to $348.5m last year, a decline of 40 percent. While study applications are now said to be recovering with the borders reopened, they are running at only 50 percent of pre-pandemic levels.
In August, Massey University also proposed a restructure affecting a possible 150 jobs. The cuts at Massey and AUT add to some 700 jobs lost across seven of the eight universities in late 2020. Groups representing postgraduate students said universities also slashed the hours of thousands of people with casual lecturing and tutoring roles.
Shan, a student in his third year of the AUT Creative Writing program and president of the Creative Writing Club told the WSWS that AUT has “really gone down in the humanities even though record profits were made. Much of what I loved is now going or gone.”
Shan said 7 or 8 papers are discontinued or not being held this semester for the BA in Creative Writing. “In the Prose/fiction papers, the club is disillusioned with AUT. Creative writing is the backbone of many students, and it's a shame to see it being picked apart,” he declared. There is now no place for a BA in Creative Writing at either AUT or Auckland University. “Many of my fellow club members are very unhappy with this trend,” he said, and students are considering mounting a petition to the faculty to restore the full program.
The Tertiary Education Union (TEU) meanwhile is preparing to collaborate with the mass sackings. Speaking to RNZ, TEU national secretary Tina Smith put on a show of being “shocked and horrified by the depth of the cuts,” declaring that the numbers of AUT staff involved were “really horrific.”
Smith made no mention however of any industrial and political program to oppose the cuts, but simply offered futile advice to the administration. Cutting courses and students was “short-term thinking and not the right approach,” she said. “Yes, it’s going to be a bit of a rocky time—but what you do in a rocky time is you stand together, you hold tight and you say “we’re going to take the long view’,” Smith advised.
AUT branch organiser Jill Jones declared staff were “bitterly disappointed” by the cuts and the union would “do everything” it could to oppose them. However, Jones admitted that the university had already instituted a “hiring freeze,” a “voluntary” leaving scheme and a travel ban, all with no sign of any resistance from the union.
Throughout years of funding cuts and attacks on jobs and wages, the TEU has collaborated in imposing the dictates of university administrations, governments and big business. Like all the unions, its perspective has been to isolate staff between institutions, suppress industrial action and call for “consultation” over how cuts are to be carried through.
The financial crisis of 2008 ushered in a period of intense university restructuring, with widespread layoffs, soaring student fees and debt, and cuts to admissions, courses and libraries. Average salaries have not kept up with inflation since 2007-8. The University of Auckland, the country’s biggest, saw salaries decline by 17 percent in real terms. The TEU collaborated with all these attacks, calling only for staff to be “brought along with the changes.”
The agenda of successive governments has been facilitated by the influence of petty bourgeois identity politics, in which the TEU is immersed. Salesa’s appointment as vice-chancellor in November 2021 was hailed as a significant event. Of Samoan descent, Salesa was the first Pacific Island Vice Chancellor at a New Zealand university. The TEU enthusiastically tweeted in response: “What a moment! We look forward to working with you.”
The TEU has preoccupied itself with gender and racial issues. Listed at the top of the “Campaigns” section of its website is a “Gender Equity Toolkit.” This provides information and support “to build collective action towards gender equity in your workplace,” including “tips, tricks, and resources to use in your union mahi [Maori for “work”]” and links to the TEU Women’s Network.
Under conditions where the unions have, for decades, collaborated with the assault on the social conditions of working people, an upper middle class layer in the unions and academia have promoted such programs to divide the working class along gender and ethnic lines. Their role has been to boost the career and remuneration prospects of a privileged elite—including within the TEU itself. The union’s 2022 Annual Report shows that with a small base of just 10,000 members, “staff related” costs amounted to $3,151,871, pointing to a well-heeled bureaucracy.
The TEU has also declared that it is “moving towards a Te Tiriti-led union,” meaning that the union’s constitution, rules and operations are being amended to embed the Treaty of Waitangi in “everything we do.” This has nothing to do with defending the jobs, wages and class interests of its members and the wider working class.
The treaty, signed by Maori chiefs and representatives of British imperialism in 1840, has been elevated to the status of a national founding document. It has for decades been used as a mechanism to elevate a section of Maori entrepreneurs, academics and public servants into the political establishment in order to contain anti-capitalist and opposition sentiment among the impoverished Maori population.
The Labour government is currently restructuring the polytechnic system, merging 16 trades training institutions nationwide into a single entity, forecast to save $52 million per annum from 2023 and requiring the shedding of a large number of jobs.
The TEU is, however, channeling members into a corporatist “consultation” process which involves making submissions on the organisation’s proposed “operating structure.” The first “principle” in the union’s submission is to “Honour the Treaty” by creating a “Māori partnership and equity space,” which will only benefit a privileged layer of cultural advisors and bureaucrats.
The World Bank has warned that synchronised interest rate hikes by central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, are pushing the global economy into a recession and the rate increases will not bring down inflation.
A person wearing a protective face mask as a precaution against the coronavirus walks past stuttered businesses in Philadelphia, Thursday, May 7, 2020 (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) [AP Photo]
The gloomy outlook was issued in an economic update on the state of the world economy released on Thursday. While adhering to the mantra that interest rate hikes are needed to “stem risks from persistently high inflation,” the bank said its “baseline scenario” was that the “degree of monetary policy expected by market participants will not be enough to restore low inflation in a timely fashion.”
Consequently a “second scenario” of a sharp downturn, with further monetary policy tightening, would eventuate but still “without restoring inflation by the end of the forecast period.”
Under a third scenario, which appears highly likely given that inflation is not expected to come down, “additional increases in policy rates would trigger a sharp re-pricing of risks in global financial markets and result in a global recession in 2023.”
Commenting on the report, World Bank president David Malpass said; “Global growth is slowing sharply, with further slowing likely to occur as more countries fall into recession. My deep concern is that these trends will persist, with long-lasting consequences that are devastating for people in emerging market and developing economies.”
Malpass, an appointee of Trump, has long been a servant of financial capital, the operations of which have brought havoc to the poorest sections of the world’s population for whom he now claims to speak.
With virtually all central banks, large and small, lifting their rates as governments reduce spending, the bank said the global economy “is in the midst of one of the most internationally synchronous episodes of monetary and fiscal tightening of the past five decades.”
One of the reasons for the synchronicity is that central banks are having to respond to the interest hikes by the Fed.
Each Fed hike, at least to this point, has led to a rise in the dollar and a devaluation of the currencies of other countries. This boosts inflation because import prices rise, particularly for energy and food, pushing other central banks to lift rates to mitigate the fall in their currencies against the dollar.
The World Bank said interest rate increases were necessary to “contain inflationary pressures”—notwithstanding its predictions to the contrary—but their “mutually compounding effects could produce larger impacts than intended, both in tightening financial conditions and in steepening the growth slowdown.”
It likened the present situation to that in 1982 when the interest rate hikes carried out by the Fed under the chairmanship of Paul Volcker led to a global recession.
The aim of that policy, though it was not referred to by the bank, was to crush the wages movement of the working class in response to inflation. The present policy, carried out in the name of “fighting inflation,” has the same objective.
The consequences threaten to be even more devastating than 40 years ago. This is because of the massive amount of fictitious capital and debt which has been built up because of the easy money policies pursued by the Fed and other central banks over the past several decades. These policies were accelerated in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008 and the March 2020 meltdown of markets at the start of the pandemic.
The bank’s update pointed to these effects noting that “rising global borrowing costs are heightening the risk of financial stress among the many emerging market and developing economies that over the past decades have accumulated debt at the fastest pace in more than half a century.”
This assessment has been underscored by Gabriel Stern, head of emerging-markets research at Oxford Economics, in comments to the Wall Street Journal. “If you get more dollar appreciation, it will be the straw that break the camel’s back. You’re already getting frontier markets on the tipping point toward crisis, the last thing they need is a strong dollar.”
The risks are not confined to emerging markets. Last week the Financial Times published a list of 207 companies it dubbed “debt monsters.” These are companies that have been able to cover over cracks in their business models because of rock-bottom interest rates but now suddenly faced the prospect of “trying to service interest bills with crimped cash flows.
Those in the list, which ranged from Britain’s largest chicken producer, a French supermarket chain, to Chinese property companies, were those whose debt was trading at more than 10 percentage points (1000 basis points) above government bonds.
In the wake of the World Bank’s warnings, more signs of a global recession emerged. On Thursday evening the global logistics company Fedex forecast a major drop in parcel deliveries around the world because of the worsening economic outlook.
Speaking to the business channel CNBC, FedEx’s newly appointed CEO Raj Subramaniam said he expected the global economy to enter a recession. The company said it was freezing hiring, closing 90 FedEx offices and parking some of its cargo aircraft.
On Friday, in response to the announcement, shares in the global delivery giant, regarded as something of a bellwether for the world economy, fell by 21 percent, the biggest single day drop in its history, worse than the Black Monday crash of October 1987, the financial crisis of 2008 and the market meltdown of March 2020.
Some of the fall may have been due to the particular circumstances of the company but others are subject to the same global forces. Shares in UPS, Amazon and XPO Logistics also dropped.
Data from the UK on retail sales also highlighted the growing recessionary trends, coming on top of the worsening situation in continental Europe, in particular Germany, where companies have imposed mass layoffs and researchers at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy have warned of a “massive recession.”
According to the UK Office of National Statistics, retail sales dropped sharply in August because of price hikes, above all for energy, contracting by 1.6 percent and reversing a small increase in July.
Capital Economics economist Olivia Cross told the FT the data suggested “that the downward momentum is gathering speed” and supported her view that “the economy is already in recession.”
The latest sales figures reflect a continuing downward trend that has been evident since the summer of last year. In April 2021 the volume of retail sales was 10 percent higher than before the pandemic. Now they are down to almost pre-pandemic levels.
In a measure of the worsening situation of the British economy, the pound fell to its lowest level against the US dollar since 1985 after dropping by around 1 percent. The euro continues to hover below parity against the US currency.
There will be no let up from the Fed as its presses ahead with its drive to impose a recession to try and crush the upsurge of struggles in the working class for wage rises and an end to the increasingly intolerable working conditions.
Markets have “priced in” as a near certainty an increase in the Fed’s base interest rate of 75 basis points when it meets this week and have revised upwards their estimate of where the Fed will land. The expectations are that its base rate will rise to 4.4 percent by March, up from 4 percent at the start of last week.
Other, even more aggressive proponents of class war against the working class, such as former Democrat treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, have called for a 100-basis point increase.
Last week Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe pompously declared that “No citizen should be allowed to starve, no child should be malnourished.” Media reportage claimed that the president was establishing an “accelerated national multi-sector combined programme to ensure food security and protect children from malnutrition.”
Young family from Deeside Estate in Maskeliya, Sri Lanka, 12 September 2022. [Photo: WSWS]
Wickremesinghe’s cynical proclamation followed a series of public warnings by international and local agencies about the growing numbers of starving families and cases of severe malnutrition among children in Sri Lanka.
The horrendous social conditions facing the masses are a direct result of the brutal measures imposed by the government of former President Gotabhaya Rajapakse and the current Wickremesinghe regime to make working people pay for Sri Lanka’s unprecedented economic crisis.
On September 12, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and World Food Program reported that Sri Lankan children are acutely vulnerable to the worsening social crisis. It noted that an estimated 6.3 million people faced “moderate to severe acute food insecurity,” and that their situation would worsen if no adequate “life-saving assistance” and livelihood support was provided.
The report warned that this would further deteriorate from October 2022 to February 2023 due to poor harvests of staple foods, such as paddy rice, and the ongoing economic crisis.
“Months into this crippling economic crisis, families are running out of options—they are exhausted. More than 60 percent of families are eating less, and eating cheaper, less nutritious food,” it stated.
But rather than provide real assistance, cash-strapped Sri Lankan governments have scaled back on nutrition programs, such as school meals and fortified food to mothers and undernourished children.
* On August 26, UNICEF South Asia Regional Director George Laryea-Adjei told a media briefing in Colombo that increasing living costs and food prices have forced many families to drastically cut their daily diet. In September 2021, inflation was 5.6 percent on a year-on-year basis. Last month it climbed to 64.3 percent, with food inflation at 93.7 percent.
According to a recent UNICEF report, 5.7 million people, including 2.3 million children, are in dire need of food support. It also revealed that 15.7 percent of children under 5 are suffering from malnutrition. Adjei warned that children could “face severe stunting and death” because their families are starving, and that malnutrition in Sri Lanka was now the second worst in South Asia and the tenth worst in the world.
According to Sri Lanka’s Department of Census and Statistics, over 10,000 children are currently in institutions, mainly because of family poverty. The UNICEF report warned that “their conditions will be compromised as the crisis worsens and as additional families place their children in institutional care since they cannot afford to feed or educate them.”
UNICEF noted that “negative coping mechanisms,” such as the “institutionalisation of children, school absenteeism/drop-out, limited food intake,” had been “aggravated by the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and current socio-economic and political crisis.”
The agency also warned that high inflation will double the number of people living in poverty over the next 24 months. Some 93 percent of those below the poverty line are in the rural and estate sectors.
Plantation school children in Akarapathana preparing to have lunch provided by an NGO.
* A June survey by Save the Children reported deteriorating psychological health of children in 30 percent of Sri Lankan families. The major reason for this was the collapse in family incomes, which had led to changes in children’s appetites and sleeping patterns and signs of increasing aggression, with an inability to control their feelings and being violent to others.
* A recent survey by the Lady Ridgeway Children’s Hospital also revealed that most of the children admitted to the facility over the past two months were suffering from ordinary or chronic malnutrition and stunted growth.
Addressing a media briefing, Deepal Perera, a specialist at the hospital, said, “If children are not saved from malnutrition, there is a danger that their intelligence quotient will decline due to lack of brain growth.”
These alarming reports constitute a damning indictment of the capitalist system and its global crisis, which is intensifying as a result of the COVID pandemic and the ongoing US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Fearful of a resumption of the mass protests and strikes that brought down the Rajapakse regime, Wickremesinghe’s declaration that “no citizen should be starved and no child malnourished” is a crude attempt to cover up this reality, even as his government prepares to unleash new IMF austerity measures.
In a parliamentary debate on the UNICEF findings on September 6, Plantation Minister Romesh Pathirana desperately attempted to refute its findings, falsely claiming it was based on a 2016 report.
World Socialist Web Site reporters discussed his assertions with estate workers and people in rural areas, who are among the most impoverished sections of the Sri Lankan working class. They pointed out that increasing prices, job losses and stagnant wages were causing malnutrition.
Kamalani Balachandran, from the Malwatte section of the Aislaby Estate in Bandarawela, said: “We could previously buy fish on salary days but this is now impossible.” They were also unable to purchase milk powder and eggs because they were too expensive. “We don’t have a proper meal for breakfast or lunch but just have a biscuit and tea. For dinner we have rice with something, and this situation does not lead to malnutrition?”
Radhika Kumari, a young computer operator at a private company but living in the same estate, said: “We cannot even purchase half the amount of goods we used to buy.” She explained that only plain tea could be given to children because of the high price of milk powder. “Estate workers can only afford to buy 50 or 100 grams of any item and only purchase a quarter of a Lifebuoy soap tablet. People don’t have money for food,” she added.
A housewife from Ahangama in southern Sri Lanka told the WSWS that she earned some income by making coir ropes at home for Hayley’s, the multinational company. Her husband, a building worker, is unable to get regular daily work and she has been unable to work recently due to illness.
WSWS reporter interviewing housewife making rope at her home in Ahangama, Sri Lanka, September 2022. [Photo: WSWS]
“If I’m able to make 15 ropes I can earn 500 rupees [$US1.40]. We don’t get any assistance from the government, or any other authority, so we can’t buy nutritional food for our children. Sending them to school is also extremely difficult,” she said.
Nimalsiri, a 58-year-old fisherman from the same village, has five children. He said that his son-in-law sometimes gets work as a day labourer but is only paid about 1,500 rupees.
“I can’t go fishing on a daily basis because of the fuel crisis,” he said, “and if I do go fishing, I only earn 1,000 rupees. How can we feed children with this pittance? We all are starving, including children,” he said, explaining that his electricity bill recently increased from 200 to 1,200 rupees.
What is the reason for rising child malnutrition in Sri Lanka? The reports point to hyperinflation, stagnant wages, food insecurity and poverty, but these are only the symptoms. The real root of this social catastrophe is the profit system, not just in Sri Lanka but across the globe.
Families at Drayton Estate in Kotagala. [Photo: WSWS]
According to a United Nations report, the number of people suffering from hunger globally rose to 828 million in 2021, a 150 million increase after the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. It estimated that about 45 million children under five years old are currently suffering from malnutrition, with a 12-fold rise in those facing death.
At the same time the world’s richest have accumulated vast amounts of wealth. According to the UN World Food Program, just $US6.6 billion of this wealth could be used to avert global hunger.
Some of the more grotesque historical distortions and outright lies trotted out since the death of Queen Elizabeth II relate to her supposed care and compassion for the citizens of the Commonwealth.
Such statements have been accompanied by film of her numerous visits to nations in Africa, India, Pakistan, and more occasionally Canada and Australia, doling out handshakes and handwaves to cheering crowds and meeting with various heads of state and the great and the good.
Photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and Commonwealth leaders, taken at the 1960 Commonwealth Conference, Windsor Castle Front row: (left to right) E. J. Cooray, Walter Nash, Jawaharlal Nehru, Elizabeth II, John Diefenbaker, Robert Menzies, Eric Louw Back row: Tunku Abdul Rahman, Roy Welensky, Harold Macmillan, Mohammed Ayub Khan, Kwame Nkrumah
The impression is given of the Commonwealth as a beneficent institution in which the monarch rubbed shoulders with the leaders, citizens and her own “subjects” within the 56-nation entity—always with the merest suggestion that such a superior being from a vastly superior nation was doing a monumental favour to all who met her.
To understand the late queen’s real motivations on these trips and her abiding “affection” for the Commonwealth means understanding the real function of an institution largely made up of former colonial possessions, used by British imperialism to bolster its diminished position as a major power on the world stage.
Britain had emerged from World War II permanently eclipsed by the United States. It was bankrupt and unable to maintain its far-flung empire. Along with France and the Netherlands and all the imperialist powers, the British bourgeoisie feared that a revolutionary upsurge in the colonies would coalesce with the movement of the working class in Europe, threatening the entire fabric of capitalist rule.
The US, confident of its ability to dominate the world and its markets by economic and military might, insisted on a change in approach towards the colonial countries: self-government would replace direct colonial rule. This policy was written into the newly formed United Nations, which provided an international cover for the dictates of US imperialism.
The granting of nominal independence to the national bourgeoisie was a vital part of the post-war arrangements whereby imperialism managed to restabilise itself for more than 40 years. The newly installed bourgeois regimes systematically suppressed the development of an independent revolutionary struggle by the working class and ensured the subordination of their economies to the imperatives of the world market, dominated by the same handful of imperialist powers that had directly ruled them.
Britain and France were forced to grant independence to their colonies, in some cases on the basis of a timetable ranging from a few years to a decade or more and in others only after bloody colonial wars as fought by the French in Algeria and the British in Kenya and Malaya.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Coronation portrait, June 1953, London, England.
The queen in her 1953 Christmas Day broadcast defined the Commonwealth as a family of nations that “bears no resemblance to the empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception, built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace. To that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races I shall give myself heart and soul every day of my life.”
The Commonwealth provided plenty of opportunities for sporting contests, economic aid and royal tours that cemented Britain’s support for venal, one-party dictatorships that protected Britain’s commercial interests.
Wherever Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) felt its vital global interests were threatened, it had no hesitation in responding with illegal and inhumane methods, including torture, as in Commonwealth member states Aden, Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya, Uganda and Zimbabwe. There are no records testifying to the queen’s opposition to that criminality.
The Mau Mau insurgency
One of the most notorious crimes was the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the in the closing days of British rule. It began shortly after the then Princess Elizabeth left Kenya in February 1952 when she heard that her father King George VI had died—her baptism of blood as Britain’s monarch.
Following in the traditions of the British Empire when confronted with dissent from its ungrateful subjects, the Royal Air Force carried out bombing raids between 1952 and 1956 that killed around 11,503 Mau Mau fighters, according to official figures. This was a gross understatement, designed to sanitise the brutality, with Harvard professor of history Caroline Elkins, Pulitzer Prize winner for Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, estimating that more than a dozen times that number, 150,000 Kenyans, were killed. By comparison, fewer than 200 Britons lost their lives.
Promoting Elizabeth’s “highest qualities of the spirit of man” involved crushing the rebellion using show trials and the public hangings of more than 1,000 Mau Mau fighters, collective punishments such as the large-scale confiscation of livestock, fines and forced labour, the torching of entire villages and the massacre of their civilian inhabitants.
British Army patrol crossing a stream during the Mau Mau rebellion.
The colonial authorities used 25,000 troops to purge the capital Nairobi of Kikuyu people, who were placed in barbed-wire enclosures. In a two-week period, 20,000 male detainees were sent to be interrogated, while 30,000 women and children were placed in the reserves, ultimately to be moved to militarised “protected villages” with 23-hour curfews. More than a million rural Kikuyu people were forcibly resettled into what were little more than concentration camps.
Thousands of people—estimates vary between 80,000 and 300,000—were detained in a network of prisons and forced labour camps, where atrocities were committed wholesale. Suspected rebels were transported with little food and water, and no sanitation. A brutal regime of interrogation developed, including beatings, starvation, sexual abuse and forced labour. Among those who were tortured was the grandfather of former US President Barack Obama.
A colonial officer described the conditions of the labour camps as “short rations, overwork, brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging—all in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
The authorities only lifted Emergency rule, which provided legal protection for the suspension of all personal freedoms and gave sweeping powers to the perpetrators of repression, in January 1960, a few years before independence in 1963. Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttleton even defended making the possession of “incendiary materials” a capital offence.
That this brutality was official policy sanctioned at the highest levels had been covered up by the British government for decades, only coming to light after a 14-year legal battle by Mau Mau veterans seeking justice and compensation for their mistreatment. A vast archive of files from 37 former colonies, held at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, had been kept secret for years.
Lieutenant General Sir George Erskine, Commander-in-Chief, East Africa Command (centre), observing operations against the Mau Mau
After a court ruling in October 2012 that the veterans had the legal right to sue the British government and demand an apology and compensation, the government agreed to discuss a settlement. It wanted to avoid the prospect of further disclosures about the brutality of the British state against Commonwealth citizens, not just in Kenya but elsewhere in Africa and Asia.
Apartheid in South Africa
The media have tried to burnish the queen’s humanitarian credentials by pointing to her much-vaunted clash with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986 over South Africa’s apartheid regime, expressing concern that Thatcher’s adamant refusal to impose sanctions on South Africa threatened the breakup of the Commonwealth.
What the media failed to point out was that the queen had not opposed South Africa’s apartheid policy that was put in place in 1948 and continued under her reign. She continued to rule as South Africa’s head of state until 1961, when it became a republic. Neither did she oppose South Africa’s membership of the Commonwealth. The South African government only withdrew from the organisation in 1961 when it became clear that the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference would reject its membership application, viewing South Africa as the embodiment of colonialism due to its racial segregation and brutal exploitation of workers.
By 1986, the mass uprising of urban youth and workers in South Africa’s impoverished townships had brought the country to the point of civil war, prompting foreign investors to withdraw, international banks to call in their loans, the currency to collapse, economic output to decline and inflation to rage.
It was this that finally forced the international and South African diamond, gold and platinum mining corporations—in which US and UK entities held major stakes—the banks and other major corporations to conclude that only Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress (ANC) and its partners, the Confederation of South African trade Unions (COSATU) and the South African Communist Party (SACP), could provide the capitalist class with a political life jacket. Mandela had been incarcerated since 1964 on Robben Island. Without their assistance, capitalism could not survive in South Africa and its collapse could trigger an eruption of political and social conflict in all the former colonies of the imperialist powers.
Frederik de Klerk and Nelson Mandela shake hands at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum held in Davos in January 1992 [Photo by World Economic Forum / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Thatcher and her co-thinker US President Ronald Reagan were the last major international supporters of the apartheid regime. The queen, in so far as she opposed Thatcher, had no moral qualms over apartheid, as the record shows. Rather, she too was persuaded by the sheer scale of class opposition of the necessity to change tactics in pursuit of the only political avenue that offered any possibility of defending Britain’s economic and political interests in the region.
South Africa was welcomed back into the Commonwealth in 1994 as Mandela became President. Neither he nor the ANC betrayed the imperialists’ hopes. Over the last 30 years, successive ANC governments, staffed by corrupt black billionaires, have created a society even more exploitative and socially unequal than the apartheid regime.
Britain’s role in these two critical experiences—many more could be cited—exposes the myth that the monarchy cared one whit about the peoples of the Commonwealth. None of this stopped the Right Honourable Patricia Scotland KC, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations, issuing a fawning eulogy to the queen, saying, “Her Majesty’s vision for the Commonwealth at the beginning of her reign has been fulfilled, fueled by her dedication and commitment.” And it will not give pause to a single talking-head or political commentator as they cynically eulogise over Elizabeth before making their services available to her son and heir, Charles III.
