Application Deadline: Each chosen course has its deadline (August-Dec). Please consult scholarship brochure for more information (See link below).
Eligible Countries: Developing countries
To be taken at (country): Germany
Fields of Study: Individual scholarships exclusively for Postgraduate courses in Germany are listed on the “List of all Postgraduate courses with application deadlines (link below)”.
About the DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships: With its development-oriented postgraduate study programmes, the DAAD promotes the training of specialists from development and newly industrialised countries. Well-trained local experts, who are networked with international partners, play an important part in the sustainable development of their countries. They are the best guarantee for a better future with less poverty, more education and health for all.
Type: Master’s, PhD
Eligibility for DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships:
Candidates fulfil the necessary academic requirements and can be expected to successfully complete a study programme in Germany (above-average result for first academic exam – top performance third, language skills)
Candidates have a Bachelor degree (usually a four-year course) in an appropriate subject
Candidates have at least two years’ professional experience
Candidates can prove their motivation is development-related and be expected to take on social responsibility and initiate and support processes of change in their personal and professional environment after their training/scholarship
Selection Criteria:
The last academic degree (usually a Bachelor’s degree) should have been completed no longer than six years previously
At least two years’ relevant professional experience
Language skills: Depending on chosen study programme; please check scholarship brochure or the website of your chosen study programme.
Number of Awards: Not specified
Value of DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships:
Depending on academic level, monthly payments of 750 euros for graduates or 1,000 euros for doctoral candidates
Payments towards health, accident and personal liability insurance cover
Travel allowance, unless these expenses are covered by the home country or another source of funding
Duration of Program: 12 to 36 months (dependent on study programme)
How to DAAD Development-Related Postgraduate Scholarships: It is important to check for your desired course HEREand go through the Program Webpage before applying.
The past few weeks have been characterised by a breathtaking escalation of the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. Hardly a day has gone by without leading politicians urging tougher action against Russia. While the Ukrainian army has attacked targets in the Russian hinterland with NATO weapons and the military alliance discussed the deployment of ground troops, the German government is vigorously pressing ahead with its preparations for a major European “land war”—as the self-proclaimed “defence industry minister” Robert Habeck (Greens) calls it.
Bundeswehr advertising poster: “Ready for the new service in your homeland?”
The government is accelerating its plans for a new compulsory military service, which Defence Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democrats, SPD) partially presented to the public last week. In the spring, Pistorius had already called for a return to compulsory military service based on the Scandinavian model in order to make Germany “fit for war.”
Last Wednesday, Pistorius then announced to the assembled press that at least 5,000 additional young men and women would be called up for “selective military service” every year from 2025. This was the maximum possible within the limits of current training capacities.
“I make no secret of it: I would like to train 20,000 conscripts every year,” said the minister. With the expansion of capacities, the number should then increase. “Three issues are central to this: personnel, material and finances. In an emergency, we need young men and women to defend this country.”
The main purpose of Pistorius’ immediate plans lies less in an immediate mobilisation than in creating the structures—registration of persons, corresponding laws, etc.—to eventually be able to call up hundreds of thousands of soldiers and reservists as cannon fodder.
According to Pistorius, the first step should be to reintroduce conscription. Since this currently exists, “Neither for those who turn 18 and would have to be drafted if we were to get into a defence situation, nor for those who have already served and are now living their lives as 40- or 45-year-old fathers,” this was an “untenable situation,” the minister said.
The current conscription plans centre on sending a questionnaire to all 18-year-old men and women, in which they are asked to provide information about their physical condition and interest in military service. The approximately 400,000 men affected each year are obliged to complete the questionnaire. If they fail to do so, they face a fine.
The selection on the basis of the questionnaire means 40,000 to 50,000 young people will then be required to take part in the draft. At the end, “We will have a precise idea of which young men and women are particularly suitable and motivated to serve our country,” explained Pistorius.
Contrary to what numerous press reports suggest—such as Der Spiegel, under the headline “Just a bit of duty”—the government’s plan is by no means based solely on the “willingness to volunteer” of young people. Not least because of the massive recruitment problems of recent decades, the government and the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) know that the aversion to the military among young people is still overwhelming.
If 5,000 volunteers were not recruited, Pistorius expressly stated it would be necessary to compulsorily enlist them. Conscription itself should be reinstated and a corresponding draft law prepared by the autumn, he said.
In addition, the number of reservists who are called up in the event of war should be more than tripled—from 60,000 to 200,000. To this end, conscripts should be called up to the reserve after their active service and train annually with active troops and other reservists.
In addition, he would like to see general compulsory service. The model now being presented was “a starting point,” said the minister, adding, “This does not rule out anything for the future.”
The scale of conscription that Pistorius and his ministry have in mind is revealed in a confidential internal paper quoted by Der Spiegel on June 7. According to this, the Bundeswehr would need around 465,000 soldiers in a “real case of defence”—meaning a war against Russia. According to the same internal paper, a further 75,000 German soldiers are required just to fulfil the defence plans already agreed by NATO.
“Overall defence framework guidelines” (RRGV)
The mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of young people in Germany for a war against Russia would require a dictatorship. The government may be able to muster 5,000 volunteers a year, but not 500,000 without draconian coercive measures.
The enormity of the government’s plans for the militarisation of the country can be seen from the “Framework Guidelines for Overall Defence” (RRGV), which were approved by the cabinet just one week before the new military service plans were announced and represent a kind of abridged version of the secret 1,000-page “Operation Plan Germany.”
This transfers the requirements of the defence policy guidelines adopted last November to society as a whole. As the WSWS commented in November, these guidelines “can only be described as a blueprint for total war.”
The RRGV now show that this assessment was by no means exaggerated. In the event of war, the whole of society is to be organised according to military requirements. Moreover, the government is obviously prepared to accept massive numbers of casualties.
For example, the guidelines only provide for “basic protection against the effects of weapons of war,” which results from the “solid building fabric available everywhere”—i.e., simple, often dilapidated residential buildings. Otherwise, underground car parks and underground stations would serve as improvised bunkers. The majority of the population would therefore be practically defenceless against massive air or artillery attacks—not to mention nuclear weapons—especially as the “usual attack scenarios” are based on “extremely short warning times.”
The extent of war devastation that the government expects from 2029 onwards also becomes clear. “Due to the possibility of damage occurring simultaneously in a large number of locations,” the paper states, people cannot expect the state to help them. As in the last two world wars, which devastated an entire generation, they must therefore be prepared to “help themselves first ... and also provide neighbourly help.”
In addition, the guidelines contain massive cuts to basic rights, such as “bans on leaving and entering.”
According to a report in Der Spiegel, the much more comprehensive “Operation Plan Germany” also deals with questions such as “whether there are enough train drivers and strikebreakers on the railway” to ensure the transport of war equipment and cannon fodder to the front. “Must an addendum be added in small print to the train drivers’ collective labour agreements: ‘In the event of war, you will drive our trains’?”
These last points in particular show that the government’s war plans are taking on the character of a conspiracy against the majority of the population. Whether at home or in the direct combat zone, they will be on the front line and are expected to sacrifice their lives and rights for the government’s great power plans and the corporate interests it represents. At the same time, those in power take great care to ensure that these facts only reach the public in fragments or not at all.
These plans are flanked by non-stop war propaganda. Four days before the European elections, in which the government parties were downright decimated, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius demanded in the Bundestag (parliament): “We must be ready for war by 2029”—thus substantiating his already well-known demand.
Last Wednesday, the minister continued, “According to all international military experts, we must assume that Russia will be in a position ... to attack a NATO state or a neighbouring state from 2029.”
Once again, the war in Ukraine serves as justification for imperialist war plans that have been in the pipeline for at least 10 years. On June 5, the minister declared in the Bundestag: “We must not believe that Putin will stop at Ukraine’s borders.” Russia was also a threat to Georgia, Moldova and NATO as a whole, he said, but did not provide any proof of this.
On June 12, tens of thousands of striking workers and students marched in the center of Buenos Aires and rallied in Congress Square to protest a legislative package of historic attacks against the working class that was ultimately approved by the Senate near midnight.
Anti-government protesters clash with police outside Congress, as lawmakers debate key state overhaul and tax bills proposed by President Javier Miliei, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, June 12, 2024. [AP Photo/Gustavo Garello]
As they approached Congress Square, protesters chanted, “Kick them all out! Let no one stay!” in reference to the fascistic Javier Milei administration and the legislature. This chant was made famous during the 2001 workers uprising that forced the resignation of then President Fernando De La Rúa and four other appointed successors in the space of a few weeks.
Bullrich claimed that the protesters attacked the police with rocks and Molotov cocktails. She accused the protesters of setting fire to a TV news vehicle and another car. She called for sedition charges against those arrested. She openly accused the followers of the Peronists, the trade unions and the pseudo-left parties of being “provocateurs of violence who speak of overthrowing the government because they do not like what this government does.”
Leaders of the protest blamed police agent provocateurs for scattered incidents. Opposition Deputy Cecilia Moreau (Union for the Fatherland Coalition) described this as one of the worse acts of repression in 40 years.
As the news of the repression spread, protests broke out in Buenos Aires’ working class neighborhoods, with people banging pots and pans and denouncing the government.
Milei congratulated Bullrich for her militaristic response, stating: “The President’s Office congratulates the Security Forces for their excellent performance repressing the terrorist groups, which attempted a coup with sticks, stones and even grenades.”
That evening, during a forum with the Cato Institute before traveling to the G7 Summit in Italy that evening, Milei preemptively blamed the protesters for potential deaths from the repression.
“Don’t discard that they will use the tactic of throwing dead people in the street, looting—something the journalists promote in their spaces,” he said.
This is the same propaganda employed by the US-backed fascist dictatorship of 1976-1983, which massacred tens of thousands of left-wing workers, youth and intellectuals while slandering them as “terrorists.”
Inside the legislative headquarters, the Senate was discussing the so-called “Law of Bases” or “omnibus bill,” which contains more than 200 counter-reforms including austerity measures, pro-market measures, privatizations and attacks against workers’ labor and democratic rights. After extensive debate, the Law of Bases squeaked through the Senate with few changes, and thanks only to the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Victoria Villaruel.
Villaruel, an open supporter of the military-fascist dictatorship, cynically declared that she was casting her yes vote on behalf of those who are “suffering” and leaving the country.
Milei’s party Libertad Avanza holds seven out of the 72 seats in the Senate; therefore it needed the votes of other parties, including Peronist legislators, along with the support from the trade union apparatus to suppress opposition.
The General Labor Federation (CGT), and the Argentine Labor Federation (CTA) refused to call for industrial actions on June 12 or to mobilize their members for the demonstrations. After workers voted for an indefinite, national strike against the bill, the cooking oil workers unions shut down their strike in response to a court order. The union apparatus is limiting its role to negotiating with Milei.
Among the most controversial measures in the bill is a system of subsidies to big business called “Rules to Incentivize Large Investments” (RIGI), which includes a 10 percent reduction in corporate taxes for very large corporations. RIGI applies to investments of over 200 million US dollars, particularly in agriculture, forestry, mining, fossil fuels, energy and technology. It exempts big business from paying tariffs to import machinery and capital goods and from taxes on export revenues. The Law of Bases also paves the way for the privatization of numerous government-owned firms.
The measures that the Senate removed included the re-imposition of income taxes, and the elimination of government subsidies to the very poor [a measure that the House of Deputies had added to the original proposal]. The bill now goes back to the lower house for a final vote on the amendments.
The June 12 vote met with the approval International Monetary Fund, which signed off on its most recent loan disbursement to the Milei administration and possibly helped to negotiate with China the renewal of a recently cancelled debt swap agreement, negotiated under the previous administration, that will make available $6.5 billion in stand-by credit to the South American nation.
Wall Street gave a thumbs up to the passage of the Law of Bases. Initially, relevant stock and bond prices went up. Bloomberg quoted from a Bank of America statement that pointed to the passage of this legislation as proof that “dialogue” is possible between Milei and his political opposition in the legislature.
Not only does the ruling class and US imperialism see the passage of this anti-working class legislation and RIGI as positive; they are also encouraged by the Milei administration’s fascistic attacks on protesting workers, coupled with the repression of left-wing groups.
During his six months on the job, the Milei administration has kept food supplies away from food banks, which are essential to poverty-stricken families, devalued the currency leading to dramatic inflation, sacked thousands of workers, repeatedly repressed protests by government employees, teachers, healthcare workers and students, raided the homes and headquarters of left-wing groups while establishing links with fascistic politicians around the world, including US former President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni.
The global financial system is operating as a kind of giant vacuum cleaner sucking up the wealth of poorer and less developed countries to fatten the bottom line of the banks and financial institutions, as billions of people are driven deeper into poverty.
This fact of economic and political life leaps out of virtually every page of a report on global trade prepared by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) earlier this month.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report: “A world of debt” [Photo: UNCTAD]
The report began by noting that global public debt was continuing to escalate rapidly, “driven by cascading crises as well as the sluggish and uneven performance of the global economy.”
In 2023, total public debt, comprising domestic and external debt, reached $97 trillion, an increase of $5.6 trillion in a year.
The sharpest increase is occurring in so-called developing countries, where in 2023 it reached $29 trillion, accounting for 30 percent of the global total, compared to 16 percent in 2010.
The report noted that while the burden of debt varies, it is “exacerbated by the inequality embedded in the international financial architecture” where “those least able to afford it end up paying the most.”
This is a significant finding. It makes clear that for all the statements by political leaders and international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, about the need to ease the debt burden and organise relief, there is no solution to be found within the framework of the international financial system. The increasing daily impoverishment of billions of people, outlined in the report, is rooted in the very structures of the system.
As the report explained:
“Developing countries are grappling with an international financial architecture, whose entrenched asymmetries exacerbate the impact of cascading crises on sustainable development. This system intensifies their debt burden by limiting access to affordable development finance and pushing them to borrow from more volatile and expensive sources.”
Overall external debt of developing countries was $3.2 trillion in 2022 and for half of these it was as high as 28.4 percent of their GDP and 92.4 percent of their exports.
The situation is worsening because governments are now allocating twice as many resources relative to revenue to service their debt as compared to 2011, “leaving a declining share of resources for investment in sustainable development.”
The picture that is so often presented is one in which loans and aid are being allocated to developing countries to finance economic development.
Actually, the flow of funds is in the other direction. This is the result of the increasing role of private credit funds within the international financial system, upon which developing countries are being forced to increasingly rely.
In 2022, developing countries paid $49 billion more to their creditors than they received in new funds. There was an inflow of $40 billion from bilateral and multilateral organisations, while private creditors, such as hedge funds and private equity groups, withdrew a record $89 billion. In effect, the money provided through official channels was used to finance private capital.
A total of 52 countries experienced an outflow of money in 2022, up from 32 in 2010. The increase reflects the impact of rising interest rates which began in 2022 as the US Federal Reserve, followed by other central banks, began lifting rates to their highest levels in several decades.
The perverse logic of the borrowing regime is illustrated by the fact that borrowing costs for developing countries were two to four times higher than in the US and six to twelve times higher than in Germany. Those who can least afford it are forced to pay more.
The effect of higher rates was reflected in the interest bill for developing countries. It rose to $847 billion in 2023, a 26 percent increase from 2021.
More than half of all developing countries allocate at least 8 percent of government revenue to interest rates. The figure has doubled over the past decade and in 2023 a record 54 developing countries, some 38 percent, most of them in Africa, allocated at least 10 percent of revenue on interest payments.
The outlay on the interest bill rose faster than spending on health and education in many developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Pacific region in the 2020‒2022 period.
During those years there were 15 countries where interest payments exceeded outlays on education and 46 where they were higher than health spending.
The report said that the number of countries where this was taking place was rising. A total of 3.3 billion people now lived in countries where spending on the interest bill was higher than on either education or health.
The UN report concluded with appeals for reforms to the “international financial architecture,” saying such calls were “loud” with more than 149 countries raising the issue at the most recent meeting of the UN General Assembly. But such calls have been made many times before and the situation has only worsened.
This is because, as the report itself acknowledged, inequality is “embedded” in the system itself.
Moreover, the same “international financial architecture” which is driving billions of people in poorer countries into ever-deeper poverty likewise dominates the lives of workers in the major economies, as parasitic finance capital demands ever-greater levels of exploitation of workers and cuts on social spending to meet its insatiable demands.
World Refugee Day 2024, the United Nations’ annual event on June 20, sets a new record for the number of refugees, at more than 41 million. Under international law, refugees are people who are forced to flee their home countries to escape persecution or a serious threat to their life, physical integrity or freedom.
When the UN established the Refugee Convention in 1951 to protect the rights of refugees in Europe in the aftermath of World War II, there were 2.1 million refugees. In 1967, the Convention was expanded to cover displacement throughout the world. By 1980, the number had surpassed 10 million and in 1990, 20 million.
Sudanese refugees displaced by the conflict in Sudan gather to receive food staples from aid agencies at the Metche Camp in eastern Chad, March 5, 2024 [AP Photo/Jsarh Ngarndey Ulrish]
The US-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, along with the civil wars in South Sudan and Syria, and other wars, caused the number of refugees to surpass 30 million by the end of 2021. The wars in Ukraine and Sudan are leading some of the fastest growing refugee crises since World War II. Around 5.7 million people were forced to flee Ukraine in less than a year. Nearly 6.5 million people have crossed into neighbouring countries, including Poland, Hungary and Moldova.
Around 72 percent of all refugees came from just five countries: Afghanistan (6.4 million), Syria (6.4 million), Venezuela (6.1 million), Ukraine (6 million) and Palestine (6 million). Most refugees live in neighbouring countries, with Iran hosting 3.8 million, Turkey 3.3 million, Columbia 2.9 million, Germany 2.6 million and Pakistan 2 million. Nearly all the refugees living in Iran and Pakistan are Afghans, while most refugees living in Turkey are Syrians.
Other countries hosting refugees include Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya and Uganda, despite their very limited resources. Even war-torn countries such as Yemen are hosting people fleeing conflict in the Horn of Africa via the Red Sea. The number of migrants arriving in Yemen in an effort to reach Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States rose from 27,000 in 2021 to more than 90,000 in 2023, according to the UN’s International Organisation of Migration (IOM), which estimates that about 380,000 migrants are currently in Yemen.
Europe and North America, with their vastly greater resources, are doing everything in their power to abrogate the Refugee Convention, turning away those seeking refuge from violence and making it all but impossible to seek asylum in their countries. Last year, 4,114 people died or were reported missing while trying to cross the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, according to the IOM.
But these 41 million souls are just some of those driven from their homes. Last year the number of people forced to flee their homes due to wars, conflicts and persecution rose to an all-time high of at least 117.3 million, and was expected to reach 120 million by last April, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This is an increase of 8 percent, or 8.8 million people, compared to 2022, continuing 12 years of consecutive rises.
Of these 117 million people, 68.3 million were internally displaced (IDPs) within their own countries. The number of asylum seekers has risen from 4.1 million in 2020 to 5.4 million in 2022, an increase of more than 30 percent, according to the IOM’s latest World Migration Report.
It is not just from war-torn countries like Syria and Afghanistan that people are fleeing. Of particular note is the number of Turkish citizens—more than 100,000—who applied for asylum in European Union (EU) countries last year, an 82 percent increase from 2022, although 75 percent of applications were rejected. They now form the third largest nationality seeking protection in the EU after Syrians and Afghans. Last year, around 15,500 Turkish citizens were arrested while irregularly crossing the US-Mexico border, up from around 1,400 in 2021.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre’s (IDMC) annual Global Report notes that in addition to the 68.3 million IDPs due to violent conflicts, a further 7.7 million were displaced by floods, storms, earthquakes, wildfires and other disasters at the end of 2023. Some 148 countries, including some high-income countries, reported disaster displacement.
Climate change is making disasters more frequent and intense. Storm Daniel in the Mediterranean officially killed 4,000 people, with 10,000-100,000 people missing in Libya.
Globally, the numbers of forcibly displaced persons are staggering. They are the outcome of wars and conflicts frequently stoked or directly waged by the imperialist powers or their local allies, as well as natural disasters created or exacerbated by the activities of the world’s giant corporations and their governments.
In all, one in every 69 people worldwide remain forcibly displaced. This is more than the entire 117 million population of the Philippines, the world’s thirteenth most populous country, or more than 1.5 percent of the world’s 7.9 billion population.
According to the UNHCR, the number of those internally displaced within their own countries reached 68.3 million at the end of 2023, nearly double the one in 125 people displaced a decade ago. Nearly half of all IDPs live in sub-Saharan Africa, forced to flee conflicts that are barely reported in the Western media.
The Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip has uprooted at least 1.7 million Palestinians, or 75 percent of the Strip’s population. Most of them have been forced to move several times.
The wars in Sudan, Gaza and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) accounted for nearly two-thirds of the new displacements. At the end of 2023, fighting between rival factions of the Sudanese military that are backed by regional powers had forced 10.8 million Sudanese to flee their homes, one of the largest numbers ever recorded in a single country.
Some 13 years after the CIA, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel backed rival militias in a bid to topple the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syria remains the world’s largest displacement crisis, with 13.8 million forcibly displaced in and outside the country.
The suffering encompassed by these statistics is impossible to fully grasp, but international funding for humanitarian relief is a pittance. While military spending rises—in 2023, the world’s total military outlay was $2.4 trillion—the UN and other aid organizations were only able to rustle up $24 billion for humanitarian aid. This was just 43 percent of the amount required to meet the most urgent needs of hundreds of millions of people.
The international media have barely mentioned the lack of funding, or the latest displacement figures. Wars, conflicts and disasters and their ensuing misery are not only normalized but have become preferred policy for the major imperialist powers and their puppet regimes in the world’s poorest countries.
South Africa’s National Assembly re-elected Cyril Ramaphosa to the presidency for a second five-year term, after his African National Congress (ANC) Party struck a last-minute coalition deal with the right-wing Democratic Alliance (DA), the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) and the Patriotic Alliance.
The Democratic Alliance is made up of the remnants of parties from the apartheid era, including the National Party that ruled South Africa from 1948 to 1994.
The National Assembly elected an ANC politician as speaker and a DA lawmaker as deputy speaker. Ramaphosa will be sworn in as president Wednesday and then unveil a new cabinet expected to include DA members.
Cyril Ramaphosa in 2019 [Photo by International Labour Organization / FLickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]
The coalition deal follows the May 29 elections in which the ANC, synonymous with the decades-long struggle against South Africa’s hated racist regime, suffered its worst electoral result since taking office after the first post-apartheid election in 1994. This, along with the record low voter registration and turnout, testifies to the decline of the ANC’s political authority among broad layers of the working class, above all the younger generation.
The ANC won just 40 percent of the vote, giving it 159 of the 400 seats in parliament. Its loss of around 16 percent of the vote was the uMkhonto weSizwe’s (MK Party’s) gain. The MK is the newly formed breakaway party of former ANC President Jacob Zuma, who was ousted from power at the hands of Ramaphosa in 2018 over long-standing corruption.
Following the elections, Ramaphosa proposed a national unity government. But after two weeks of backroom talks and political horse trading, he was able to secure his political survival only by turning to John Steenhuisen’s Democratic Alliance, whose rabidly pro-business party came second, winning 22 percent of the vote.
DA leaders justified overturning last year’s resolution never to work with the ANC, saying that it was important to prevent a “doomsday coalition” between the ANC and the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF). Steenhuisen said that it was essential to come together and collaborate to prevent subversive forces filling the political vacuum, adding, “It’s the patriotic thing to do.”
Zuma’s MK Party, which got the third highest vote share, refused to work with the ANC as long as Ramaphosa remained leader. It disputed the election results, claiming the election had not been either free or fair, and called on South Africa’s top court to stop Friday’s convening of parliament. The election commission defended results that were accepted by the other main parties.
The EFF, an ANC splinter group led by Julius Malema that utilises leftist and hardline black nationalist phraseology and won nearly 10 percent of the vote, likewise refused to work with the ANC.
The ANC’s coalition also includes the small Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), a right-wing, Zulu nationalist party, with which it had fought a virtual civil war during the late 1980s and early 1990s that left thousands dead and threatened to derail the 1994 election. The inclusion of the IFP, which received 3.8 percent of the vote, provides the ANC a means of deflecting criticism for working with the white-led DA. Velenkosini Hlabisa, Inkatha’s leader, said, “This presents an important opportunity between the two political parties to heal the wounds of the past.”
A fourth member of the coalition is the deeply reactionary Patriotic Alliance (PA), which received 2 percent of the vote. The PA, which wants to bring back the death penalty and deport illegal immigrants, has its support base in South Africa’s communities in the Gauteng and Western Cape provinces.
Ramaphosa called the agreement with the DA a “new birth, a new era for our country,” adding that it was time for parties “to overcome their differences and to work together.” He has agreed an eight-page document governing their coalition, including fine phrases about decision-making based on consensus, respect for the constitution and opposition to racism and sexism, with a priority to be given to “rapid, inclusive and sustainable economic growth.” The financial markets, heaving a sigh of relief, approved of the deal, with the rand, South Africa’s currency, rallying slightly against the dollar.
Ramaphosa’s embrace of the Democratic Alliance—until now the official opposition party—and other right-wing parties, at the risk of splintering his faction-ridden ANC, is the logical expression of its pro-capitalist agenda. The ANC had from its inception a bourgeois nationalist program. Notwithstanding the socialist phraseology borrowed from the Stalinist South African Communist Party (SACP), the ANC’s 1955 Freedom Charter guaranteed bourgeois property rights and upheld the institutions of the capitalist state. That is why, after years of violently suppressing the ANC, the apartheid government of President F.W. De Clerk turned to Nelson Mandela and his ANC in 1990 to prevent a social revolution.
The ANC, with its pro-business agenda aimed at encouraging inward investment into South Africa—known unofficially as “cautious Thatcherism” after Britain’s notoriously pro-market prime minister of the 1980s—did nothing to improve the social conditions of the vast majority of South Africans. They still today live in conditions of utmost squalor, without secure access to electricity or running water, plagued by rampant crime, corruption, poverty and astronomic unemployment levels, particularly among South Africa’s predominantly young population.
While white South Africans continue to control the majority of the national wealth, the ANC’s Black Economic Empowerment programme enabled a thin layer of black businessmen and a handful of black politicians and trade union leaders to enrich themselves and provide a social base for the post-apartheid regime. Ramaphosa, the former head of the miners’ union, has an estimated personal wealth of $450 million–dwarfing that of his rival Zuma.
Ramaphosa’s decision to cut a deal with the vehemently pro-market and pro-Washington Democratic Alliance sparked fears among ANC members that it signals the end of affirmative action and even token efforts to end poverty. The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the trade union federation that is a key member of the ANC “Tripartite Alliance” along with the SACP, had threatened to quit the alliance if it entered government with the DA.
The ANC sought to counter this, with party official Fikile Mbalula pointing out that in the first government of national unity in 1994, the ANC’s coalition included the National Party, the party of apartheid! He asked rhetorically, “We went into government with people who took us to jail. Did we die? We didn’t. Did we survive that moment? We did.”
Cutting a deal with the Democratic Alliance means intensifying a programme of class war at home in the interest of South African and international capital under conditions where South Africa, the world’s most unequal society, is a social and political powder keg. It is likely to entail closer relations with US imperialism under conditions where the ANC had sought to use its economic relations with China, Russia, Iran and Cuba and its membership of the BRICS group of countries as a bargaining chip in its dealings with the Washington-dominated financial and political institutions.
There was a noticeable absence of any discussion during the election campaign of the global war initiated by US imperialism of which the NATO-instigated war with Russia over Ukraine, the imperialist-backed Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and Washington’s military-strategic offensive against China are three key arenas.
The ANC has for decades supported the Palestinians, most recently bringing charges of genocide and war crimes against Israel to the International Court of Justice. In relation to the US proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, Pretoria has refused to fall in line with Washington—abstaining on six UN resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, refusing to implement sanctions against Russia and appealing to the International Criminal Court not to enforce an arrest warrant on Vladimir Putin so the Russian president could visit their country.
Last year, South Africa carried out naval exercises with China and Russia, seriously straining relations with Washington. In May 2023, US ambassador to South Africa Reuben Brigety called a press conference to denounce South Africa for selling weapons to Russia, without producing any evidence to back his claim.
None of this was the subject of any debate during the election campaign, even though the ANC and DA hold opposing views on all these issues.
The fracturing of the ANC and its disastrous election results gives a pale and distorted indication of the mass anger against the whole rotten capitalist set-up of post-apartheid South Africa. There have been numerous and very bitter working-class struggles, most notably the 2012 miners’ strike where Ramaphosa’s demand for a police clampdown precipitated the Marikana massacre of 34 striking miners, who were shot dead at a mine owned by the Lonmin group where the former head of the National Union of Mineworkers was a non-executive director.
Since then, the “Butcher of Marikana” has done everything he could to prop up South African capitalism, cutting corporate taxation as he drove down workers’ pay, reneging on public sector wage deals and slashing living standards. It has earned him the undying hatred of South African workers. Striking gold miners at Sibanye-Stillwater booed Ramaphosa—COSATU’s guest of honour—off the stage at the 2022 May Day rally in Rustenburg, the centre of the country’s mining region.
Repeated strikes for higher wages by metalworkers, public sector workers, teachers, healthcare and transport workers, as well as one- and two-day mass protest strikes have been systematically isolated by COSATU and the trade unions that are politically tied to the ANC.
The elections have underscored that the ANC is sitting on a political and social volcano. The new ANC-Democratic Alliance government will be a regime of extreme crisis.
A new study has found that the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past four years coincides with a new surge in many other infectious diseases far beyond their pre-pandemic levels. The study was reported by Airfinity, a UK-based data and analytics company that specializes in monitoring and forecasting trends in global disease and public health.
The implication of this finding is that the systematic dismantling of public health measures by capitalist governments worldwide, allowing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, unimpeded access to the world’s population, has created the conditions for even greater damage to human health.
Airfinity previously tracked the horrendous impact of lifting Zero-COVID in China at the end of 2022, which led to hundreds of millions of people being infected and more than a million deaths. Last week the company posted a new analysis on its webpageshowing that “the world is seeing a resurgence of at least 13 infectious diseases, with cases higher than before the pandemic in many regions. Over 40 countries or territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s 10-fold or more over their pre-pandemic baseline.”
Global map of recent outbreaks of 13 infectious diseases. [Photo: Airfinity]
As the figure above indicates in the upper left-hand corner, these include cholera, dengue, invasive group A streptococcal disease, which can cause “strep throat” but with severe and deadly ramifications, tuberculosis, polio and influenza. Other diseases on the rise that have significant consequences for children and immunocompromised people include measles, respiratory syncytial virus, chickenpox and pertussis.
The surges in these diseases beyond their pre-pandemic levels, in some cases by many orders of magnitude, are deeply troubling. In this process, Long COVID seems to play a central role. It can affect nearly every organ system in the human body and acts as a mass disabling event, with more than 200 symptoms meticulously documented by the National Academy of Sciences.
In the US alone, nearly one in five people has experienced Long COVID, amounting to 50 million people. The prevalence of the chronic disease stands at almost 7 percent, or around 17.6 million.
Phillip Alvelda, CEO & chairman of Brainworks Foundry and a former program manager in the Pentagon’s Biological Technologies Office, which was instrumental in the development of the mRNA vaccine technology, described the impact of Long COVID exposure on immune resistance to other diseases in a recent two-part interview published by the Institute of New Economic Thinking. He stated emphatically:
Even a mild or asymptomatic infection can harm the immune system. It can make you susceptible to new diseases that might not have bothered you before, but now, with your weakened immune system, these new diseases can find a foothold and attack you. Also, conditions that may have been dormant or held in check in your body by your immune system could resurface now that it’s weakened—things like shingles, HIV, or a resurgence of herpes. We’re seeing resurgences of all those things in the general population. We’re also seeing a resurgence in measles, whooping cough, and polio—all these things that we thought we’d gotten rid of.
The long-term impacts are considerable and most likely lifelong. Even two years out, risks of heart attack are double and risks of stroke triple, to say nothing of the myriad neurological and metabolic issues that contribute to the overall deterioration of health. This only raises the specter that repeat infections cause cumulative damage, further weakening the entire human organism. Presently, on average, every American has experienced three bouts of COVID-19, a figure now estimated to more than double by next year at the current pace.
Worse, how such infections have impacted children who are repeatedly exposed to COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens in crowded and poorly ventilated schools remains a largely uninvestigated area. This is a direct consequence of the ruling class campaign to reopen “the economy,” i.e., capitalist profit-making, by reopening the schools so that parents of school-aged children could be forced to go to work.
Communities have been inundated by the perpetuation of the lie that children are impervious to COVID-19. The current figures showing widespread academic declines are being falsely attributed to lockdowns, which helped save lives in the initial throes of the pandemic, and not to the impact of the health consequences of the disease itself on children’s ability to learn.
The point on children was made obvious in a recent report from Australia titled, “Too many children with Long COVID are suffering in silence.” David Putrino of Putrino Labs, a rehabilitation innovation body for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, who has been at the forefront on studying and treating the condition, said, “These kids’ world just gets very small, very quickly.”
He added:
We see kids missing school, being unable to participate in sports. We see social isolation. Long COVID is a lot more complicated and more brutal for young people. Adults tend to be better able to navigate the medical intricacies and politics of their illness. I don’t like comparative suffering as a concept, but I do know that kids are having a harder time with it because people seem to be less understanding of it.
All this also means that Long COVID kills, a point that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and federal public health officials have downplayed. As Alvelda noted, Long COVID is killing “immediately one and a half percent of the people that get it.”
However, discussions about COVID-19 and its consequences have largely disappeared from the corporate media. Public health dashboards have been taken down. Instead, anti-scientific policies that assure the public it is safe to return to work despite being infected with a contagious pathogen are being promulgated. This simply means that the policy of mass death has become “officially” normalized.
The only significant exception to the corporate silence was the major Bloomberg News report produced in collaboration with Airfinity, which documented the resurgence of the 13 communicable diseases. Some of the facts noted in this report are startling:
Influenza cases in the US have jumped 40 percent compared to pre-pandemic years.
Whooping cough, or pertussis cases, rose by 45 times in China in the first four months of 2024 compared to the year before.
In Australia, cases of respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, have nearly doubled from a year ago.
Argentina and Brazil are facing their worst ever outbreaks of dengue fever.
In Japan, there is an unexplained surge of Streptococcal A.
Measles is resurgent in Britain, parts of continental Europe and 20 states in the US.
On a world scale, there were 7.5 million people with new cases of tuberculosis in 2022, the worst total since the World Health Organization started global monitoring in the mid-1990s.
Table of infectious diseases, geographic regions affected. [Photo: Airfinity]
As the table suggests, there are numerous causes, which differ from region to region, but nearly all are related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and all are exacerbated by the global crisis of capitalism.
The only effective means to combat COVID-19 and these reemerging pathogens, whether common or rare, are basic tried and tested public health policies: testing, tracking and isolation; masking with N95 masks; cleaning indoor air. Healthcare systems and public health infrastructure need resources to function as they were intended. And with the threat posed by the highly pathogenic bird virus, there are immediate concerns for which the world is less prepared than ever before.
