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Abstract
Although the relationship between poverty and human rights is only recently beginning to be examined it has always been dynamically intertwined. Poverty is a relative concept but its intrusion into human dignity is unmistakable. This article argues that human rights are strong tools for fighting poverty. Traditionally in Africa, poverty and wealth were communal and communality defined their existence. At the same time poverty in Africa is interrelated with diverse factors, such as racism, the impact if colonialism, and in the current era of globalisation, the operation of multi-national companies. Poverty is also highly related to governance and typically the African big-men syndrome and so-called ‘irrational belief’ structures. Although the UN Covenant on economic, social and cultural rights may not be a panacea for progress, if combined with other sets of human rights, it is a suitable weapon to combat poverty.
Notes
Mark 10: 17–22.
Red Pepper, September 1, 2007.
President Y. Museveni repeatedly made public statements in April 2007 to the effect that Africa has not been able to develop because of its insufficient numbers which would give it a big market. He therefore encouraged the Ugandans to produce adding that educating them would be his duty.
Alex Duval Smith, ‘Kalahari Bushmen win ancestral land case’, The Independent, 14 December 2006, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/kalahari-bushmen-win-ancestral-land-case-428366.html.
In spite of the judgment of this case, however, this matter remains unsettled because, it is arguable that the San had, in the previous 20 years or so, abandoned the traditional life of hunting and wandering. A number of them had settled on water bore holes suggesting that modern technology and education were critical for their life, and therefore there were more implications for human rights understanding and application.
Elisa Reis and Mick More, eds, Elite Perceptions of Poverty and Inequality (Cape Town: CROP, 2005), 144.
Ibid.
A. Greenspan, ‘The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a new World’, Daily Telegraph, September 17, 2007.
Virtual Truth Commission. http://www.geocities.com/%7Evirtualtruth/mult.htm (accessed September 5, 2007).
It may be argued that Americans are more culpable not only because of their well-considered intentions and awareness of human rights principles but also because their actions have a wide range of consequences such as the numerous lives lost.
Amartya Sen, Reason, ‘Freedom and Well being’, Utilitas, 18, no.1 (2006), 308.
Ibid., 309.
Amartya Sen, ‘Reason Freedom and Well-being’, Utilitas 18, no.1 (2006): 80–96; Edward Wamala, ‘Poverty Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa: Human Rights issues at Stake’. Paper presented at the Summer School, Makerere University, Kampala, January 22, 2008.
Ibid.
(Darwin, cited in Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 67).
For the two presidential elections of 2001 and 2006, the pattern has been that nearly all the urban areas have been won by presidential candidate Kiiza-Besigye while many rural areas were won by President Museveni. Clearly in the rural areas, there is little debate and understanding of the critical issues related to development and, if it is allowed, it is one-sided in favour of government.
Wamala, ‘Poverty Discourse in Sub-Saharan Africa’.
(Pogge, 2002: 66).
Ibid.
Placide Tempels, Bantu Philosophy (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1938 [1959]).
Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Unity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 54–8; John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 39–47.
I. Katorokire, ‘A Human Rights Study of Human Ritual Sacrifice and its Underlying Gender Aspects: A Comparison of Katerera Sub-County (Bushenyi District) and Nama Sub-county (Mukono District) From 1990–2003’, MA Dissertation, Makerere University, Kampala, 2005.
State House, Republic of Uganda, Press Release, 3 October 2005, http://www.statehouse.go.ug/ (accessed 23 August, 2008).
Wenche Barth Eide and Uwe Kracht (eds), Food and Human Rights in Development, Volume 1 (Antwerp and Oxford: Intersantia, 2005).
Greenspan, ‘The Age of Turbulence’.
(Eide and Kracht (eds), 2005).
There have been positive developments in the world including South Africa in the case of Grootboom v. Republic of South Africa, in the case of protecting the right to access information and participate in decision-making processes affecting the right to water in the city of Buenos Aires in Argentina and many other cases. See also, E. Riedel and P. Rothen, eds, The Human Right to Water (Berliner: Wissenschafts-verlag, 2006).
Marek Thee, ‘The Philosophical-Existential Issues of the Human Rights Project: Challenges of the 21st Century’, in Human Rights in Developing Countries, YearBook, ed. Baard-Anders Andreassen and Theresa Swineheart (Oslo: 1993), 5.
Lucy Wiliams, Asbjorn Kjornstad and Peter Robson, eds. Law and Poverty, The Legal System and Poverty Reduction (London: CROP, 2003), 16.
(Rukooko, 2005).
Vigdis Broch-Due and A.R. Schroader, Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa (Nordiska Afrikaninstitutet, 2000), 9f.
A. Ruch and K. Anywanu. African Philosophy: An Introduction to the Main Philosophical Trends in Contemporary Africa (Rome: Catholic Book Agency, 1984), 77.
Ibid., 185.
Ibid.
Ibid., 195.
Ibid.
Many times I have travelled to Europe I have been singled out at the airport from among hundreds of Europeans for extra and humiliating checking. Normally, I would keep quiet, but the last time I went to the University of Zurich (13 September 2007) my black colleague complained publicly. If it is because of terrorism, it is not the blacks that are at the centre of terrorism. If it is political power, blacks have no immediate possibility of getting European power. So what is it if not racism?
P.G. Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 38.
(Rukooko, 2005).
Kenneth Kaunda, Humanist in Africa (London, 1963), 21.
Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights, 160–7.
Ibid., 179.
(Williams et al., 2003: 1)
Ibid.
This matter is so urgent that only recently (September 20, 2007), it led to suspension of a state minister, Mr Kasirivu. Recently, the president has encouraged recruiting only members of his party in public service even after Uganda has opened for a multi-party dispensation (BBC News, Wednesday, September, 27, 2007 (see also news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/7015433.stm)).
Edward Mulindwa, ‘Media Facilitates Mass Murder and Looting in Africa’, 2008. groups.yahoo.com/group/zimsite/messages/38939?o=1&xm=1&m=p
BBC, September 27, 2007.
Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Lynne Rienner/IDRC, 2000), 48-59.
Ibid., 137–40; Karen Ballentine and Jacke Sherman, The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance (Lynne Rienner/IDRC, 2003), 19-42.
US Non-Governmental Delegation Trip Report, September 6-20, 1999, www.codesria.org/Links/Publications/monographs/Cyril_Obi.pdf.
Ibid.
It also allows collective representation for the values and choices of consumer groups, while empowering individual customers vis-à-vis the marketplace and industry.
Thee, ‘The Philosophical-Existential Issues of the Human Rights Project’; Micheline Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalisation Era, (University of California Press, 2004), 246. Infopressure and infoactivity refer to bombarding the people with huge amounts of information and infoactivity simply means hyped, over indulgence in information generation, storing and distribution of information respectively.
Ishay, The History of Human Rights, 246.
Greenspan, ‘The Age of Turbulence’.
Francis Appiah, Donald Chimanikire and Thorvald Gran (eds), Professionalism and Good Governance in Africa (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2005), 56–7.
Francis Appiah, Donald P. Chimanikire, and Thorvald Gran (eds), Professionalism and Good governance in Africa, Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 2005, 128.
Agnes Asiimwe and Angelo Izama, African Leaders steal $148 billion a year, Daily Monitor, Kampala, September 21, 2007.
The rate at which corruption is being exposed during power struggles as indeed expressed by Gran in ‘Professionalism in African Settings’, in Appiah et al., Professionalism and Good Governance in Africa, 57.
It may be seen as an exaggeration that I am using the term ‘mafia’ to describe the Ugandan political experience. However, this term was first used in President Museveni's rule by none other than his Vice President, Gibert Bukenya, when he was referring to his colleagues who were fighting him. Besides this claim, I am also convinced that the behaviour of the NRM leadership easily fits that description.
D. Du Bois, ‘Beware the Big Man Syndrome’, in Zvakwana, Mind. http://menewsdaily.com/2007/09/03/sadc-africa-bewareofthe-big-man-Syndrome/ (accessed August 18, 2008).
F. Ngige, The Standard (Nairobi, Kenya), October 3, 2007, 8. Nairobi, Kenya.
Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights, 303.
Thee, ‘The Philosophical-Existential Issues of the Human Rights Project’.
(Tomuschat, 2003:211).
Ibid., 73–5.
Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights, 303.
I treat the right to development as being essentially complementary to the ICESCR. See Art.1 of the Declaration on the Right to Development (GARes.41/128, December 4, 1986). It is considered vague because its legal content remains unresolved by the working groups leading to nothing to date as the French would say, ‘qui trop embrasse, mal etreint’, which means that whoever pursues too ambitious goals will eventually end up with empty hands. See Michael Freeman, Key Concepts: Human Rights (Polity Press, 2003).
Many American groups including the followers of McCarthyism, members of the American Bar Association and the Daughters of the American Revolution treated human rights as a ‘UN blue print for tyranny’. See Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights, 237. To date the US has not yet ratified the ICESCR and CEDAW and the famous Tokyo protocols.
Asbj⊘rn Eide, Catarina Klause and Allan Rosas, Economic Social and Cultural Rights. A Textbook (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2001), 553; Fortman in Williams, 2006: 35–6.
Eide et al., Economic Social and Cultural Rights, 557.
Ibid., 561.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999).
Thee, ‘The Philosophical-Existential Issues of the Human Rights Project’, 5.
It is reported that in 1820, the European worker was generally getting three times what the African worker was getting. But today, the European worker gets twenty times as much as his/her African counterpart. See Poverty in Africa, Wikipedia, free encyclopedia.
Joe Oloka-Onyango, ‘The Problematic of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Globalised Uganda: A Conceptual Review’. Working paper no. 3, Huripec, Makerere University, March, 2007, 12.
(Resnsburg, in Williams, 2006:126).
Ibid.
Philip Alston, ‘A Human Rights Perspective on the Millennium Development Goals’. Paper Presented as a Contribution to the Work of the Millennium Project Task Force on Poverty and Economic Development, 2006.
Thomas Pogge was making this point in his lectures at the summer school on human rights and development that took place at the University of Bergen, Norway, from 5–8 August 2008.
Under the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS), a pillar of the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA) as a government strategy for eradicating poverty in Uganda, the definition of the poor was categorised into the ‘destitute’ and the ‘active poor’ whereby the former would not be directly supported. For this categorisation, it is increasingly becoming clear that the destitute have been forgotten several years into the implementation of the NAADS (since 2002). See, Ministry of Agricultural, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF) and Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development (MFPED), Kampala, Uganda, 2000.
Ibid.
Oloka-Onyango, ‘The Problematic of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in Globalised Uganda’, 60.
Preamble and art. 1, UDHR, 1948.
(Pogge, 2002: 196–215).
(St.Clair, in Wiliams, 2006: 15).