On Antibiotic Resistant E.coli and Common Sense

Professor Joe Cummins wants lawmakers to do more than talk about the ethics of biomedical research.

How are labs making sure that engineered microbes don’t escape into the environment and pass on their traits in an uncontrollable way? The question may seem like a no-brainer, but Canada and the United States have virtually no special legal or regulatory requirements for the safety of labs that work with GM bacteria and viruses.

Germs Gone Wild
By Alex Roslin Straight.com

It is the end of June, and Catherine Anderson is excited about summer camp. She won’t be playing in the pool or catching butterflies. She is going to Geneskool.

Anderson is the organizer of the two-week camp that kicked off for the first time at the University of British Columbia this July. Twenty students entering Grades 10 and 11 got a chance to sequence DNA and do a family gene pedigree.

And, oh, yes, they will create a new life form: genetically modified Escherichia coli bacteria, better known as E. coli.

“It’s really easy,” says Anderson, a UBC instructor in dentistry and medicine and a consultant at Genome British Columbia, a provincial-federal agency that gets corporate funding to promote biotechnology. “We’re using a kit that has E. coli. You put in a plasmid with an antibiotic-resistant gene and a green fluorescent protein from a jellyfish. The next day, the kids get to see their kit grow green. Plus, the E. coli will have antibiotic resistance.”

Anderson quickly adds, “It’s not scary antibiotic resistance. These bacteria are very safe.”Geneskool, sponsored by UBC and Genome B.C., is just one of dozens of places—mostly high schools and colleges—where Canadian teenagers are being encouraged to try their hand at genetic engineering.

“It’s the perfect marriage between recreation and science,” Anderson says on the phone from the UBC lab hosting the camp.

It all leaves Joe Cummins stunned. He thinks letting teens create drug-resistant bacteria is one of the craziest things he has heard. Cummins is one of Canada’s most prominent geneticists.
“I think it’s spectacularly stupid,” he says over the phone from his home in London, Ontario. “Any way you cut it, these high-school kids will get it [E. coli] on them. That’s inescapable among these young kids.”

Cummins, 72, a professor emeritus at the University of Western Ontario, is a walking library of genetics knowledge. Retired for nine years, he still works at a dizzying pace, dashing off new papers and scouring obscure patent applications and the latest genetics research.

On hearing about Geneskool, Cummins immediately thinks of a landmark Dutch study from 1991. It surprised scientists by discovering that their lab coats were routinely contaminated by genetically modified bacteria, which often also penetrated to clothes underneath.

“The kids could carry this into the environment on their hands and clothes, and it [the antibiotic-resistant trait] can persist in their bodies for years,” he says.

That’s troublesome, according to Cummins, because the students are giving the E. coli resistance to the antibiotic ampicillin, which is commonly used to treat bacterial infections and as a last-resort drug against bacterial meningitis and the deadly strain of E. coli that killed seven people and made 2,000 sick in Walkerton, Ontario. The E. coli used at Geneskool is a different, harmless strain.

But Cummins says the risk is that it could pass on its ampicillin resistance to any of the billions of other bacteria that live in a person’s body or into the environment if it hitches a ride out of the lab on a student.

At the company that makes the genetic engineering kit, Bio-Rad Canada, life-science manager Tab Meyers says 70 to 100 of the kits have been sold across the country in the past four years, each good for a class of 32 students or more. He won’t name any of the schools that bought kits because he doesn’t want to “give them bad press”.

But he says the drug-resistant E. coli is perfectly safe “unless kids ingest it. It’s not a biohazard per se. It’s a relatively low dose. The only way they could come into contact with it is by the hands if they are not wearing gloves,” he says on the phone from his Toronto office.

One of the guest speakers at Geneskool is Julian Davies, a prominent UBC professor of microbiology and immunology. Davies also defends the E. coli experiment. He says there is only a “very small” chance that the ampicillin resistance would spread to an organism in a student’s body.

“I don’t think people understand risk-benefit ratios. The benefits are high because you are giving these students knowledge. The risks are extraordinarily small,” Davies says on the phone from his office. “I’m probably full of ampicillin-resistant bugs. I never drink any [bacteria] cultures, but I’ve spilled it on my hand.”

That doesn’t reassure Cummins. “There’s just no way young kids should be exposed to that resistance marker [gene],” he says. He says high-school biotech experiments are an all-too-common example of the lax attitudes of scientists and public officials toward the horde of genetically modified bacteria and viruses being engineered in labs around the world.
“This is typical of much of Canadian biotechnology,” he says. “They tend to be wildly careless.”

So far in the debate about genetic engineering, tiny germs have mostly escaped attention. The focus has been on things like GM-food labels and the ethics of designer babies or cloned pets. Yet the single most genetically transformed organism isn’t canola, sheep, or the glow-in-the-dark pet GloFish. It is the wee little E. coli bacterium, which lives by the billions in every person’s gut.

The E. coli is the love machine of the living world. It multiplies so fast that a single organism’s offspring could weigh as much as the Earth in two days if they didn’t run out of food or space. Drug-making companies harness the awesome sexual power of the E. coli and other microbes as their main workhorses on which to experiment with new drugs.

New species of E. coli are created every day after being chopped up and reshuffled with genes from people, pigs, jellyfish, and viruses like HIV. The E. coli is so prolific at passing on its genes, in fact, that it can do so even after it is dead.

That’s what keeps Cummins up at night. How are labs making sure that engineered microbes don’t escape into the environment and pass on their traits in an uncontrollable way?
The question may seem like a no-brainer, but Canada and the United States have virtually no special legal or regulatory requirements for the safety of labs that work with GM bacteria and viruses.

The main confinement and disposal rules are voluntary guidelines. The hundreds of Canadian and U.S. labs that make GM microbes are on the honour system. Regulators in both countries don’t even know how many such labs exist or what they are creating.

And neither country requires labs to report any but the most serious GM lab accidents.
In the foothills of the Rockies, in Denver, Colorado, Suzanne Wuerthele shares Cummins’s worries. She is not just another run-of-the-mill biotech skeptic. Wuerthele has been a risk- assessment expert at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for 20 years and is its regional toxicologist for six western states.

“There has been a lot of hype about GM plants and salmon, but microorganisms have much more potential to do things we would not be happy with and to do it without us even knowing about it,” she says.

Wuerthele had a front-row seat for one near-catastrophe: the case of the rogue Klebsiella planticola. It all started just over the Rockies from Wuerthele’s office, in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley.

There, in Oregon State University’s botany department, Professor Elaine Ingham stepped into her lab one day in 1992, not imagining that she would stumble on a potential biotech Chernobyl.
Her grad student was in a panic. The Mason jars in which they were growing wheat were filled with brown mush. Ingham had gotten an EPA grant to test a genetically engineered strain of Klebsiella, a common soil bacterium.

A European company was planning to commercially market the modified bacterium, K. planticola, which was being touted as a miracle product for farmers—engineered to decompose plant stubble and debris left over on fields after harvest time. The process would create valuable byproducts: fertilizer sludge and alcohol.

But when Ingham, a soil microbiologist, saw her jars, the flaw in this intrepid plan became clear. All 15 wheat plants growing in soil with the engineered K. planticola were dead, while the plants growing with natural K. planticola were just fine. Ingham repeated the experiment four times in different soils, with the same results: the GM Klebsiella killed the plants.

If the nasty bacteria got out in the wild, she surmised, it would probably spread uncontrollably, wiping out crops, forests, and ecosystems in its path and unleashing an environmental disaster.
“That would have been the end of terrestrial plants,” she says in a phone interview from Corvallis, Oregon, where she now runs an organic-consulting business.

“It would have dispersed any time a bird moved it to another field.” Alarmed, Ingham contacted the EPA. She was told the agency had already determined the product was safe and was close to approving it for experimental field trials in the open air. “You’ve got to stop that,” Ingham replied.

The EPA shelved the monster germ. And then the episode was promptly forgotten.
The reaction to Ingham’s finding was also curious. Scientific journals refused to publish the results; it took seven years to find one that would.

In the meantime, Ingham and her grad student came under attack from biotech supporters and both ended up quitting the university. Today, many scientists have never heard of the near miss.

Wuerthele still finds the episode troubling and says it illustrates the government’s sometimes hands-off approach to overseeing genetic engineering. “We don’t really know what would have happened,” she says. “This microorganism interfered with plant growth. It could have caused serious agronomic problems and it could have spread, but we don’t know how far.”

Wuerthele found herself at the centre of yet another GM flap in the mid-1990s. Becker Underwood, an Iowa-based agrifood giant, wanted the EPA’s approval for a genetically modified strain of a soil bacterium called Rhizobium meliloti. An EPA colleague asked Wuerthele to look at the agency’s risk assessment. The product was to be the first GM microbe okayed for commercial sale in North America.

Rhizobium is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that lives on the roots of legumes; it had been engineered to allow farmers to increase alfalfa yields.

The problem for Wuerthele was that the bacteria were also engineered to contain marker genes that conferred resistance to two antibiotics used against tuberculosis, tularemia, and the plague. (Scientists often insert drug-resistant marker genes into GM microbes and crops so they can later tell if a particular organism is genetically modified or not.) The drug resistance could pass on to other organisms in the environment, Wuerthele thought. Would it spawn a superbug, an antibiotic-resistant pathogen dangerous to humans?

Wuerthele was flabbergasted when she saw the risk assessment. “It was a joke, three or four pages, and it didn’t ask any questions,” she says. “I got kind of wound up, asking a lot of questions about this.” Wuerthele discovered that 2,000 species of legumes growing in North America also have Rhizobium on their roots. No one had studied how the product might affect them. Would they become invasive superweeds?

To make matters worse, it wasn’t even clear that the bacteria really helped alfalfa grow better.
In Washington, EPA officials, under enormous pressure to okay biotech products, dithered for years about what to do. Finally, the product was referred to an outside advisory panel. Only one of the six scientists on the panel gave it the thumbs up.

When it became clear the EPA would move to approve the bacteria anyway, one member, Conrad Istock, resigned in protest. “It’s just good practice not to leave antibiotic resistance in organisms that you are going to release,” Istock, now a visiting fellow at Cornell University, says in a phone interview from his home in Ithaca, New York. “According to risk-benefit analysis, if it has no benefit why take the risk?”

The EPA approved the Rhizobium for sale in 1997. The agency never followed up to study the impact of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Wuerthele says, or even to see if it actually helped farmers grow more alfalfa.

In Canada, Joe Cummins was one of the few scientists in the world to take an interest in the Klebsiella and Rhizobium cases. He had been warning about biotechnology for years, but this was worse than anything he had imagined.

“Potentially, it was a doomsday scenario,” he says of the K. planticola close call.
“The regulators in the U.S. and Canada are very harebrained and not attuned to the consequences of their actions.” The lack of government oversight, Cummins says, has allowed GM drug-resistant microbes to escape from labs for many years. And that, he believes, may be a big reason for the rise of drug-resistant diseases around the world in the past 30 years.It is a controversial claim that runs counter to orthodox scientific opinion, which holds that the main culprit is the overuse of antibiotics in hospitals and cattle feed.

But Cummins says antibiotics have been widespread since the Second World War, while supergerms started appearing in huge numbers only in the 1970s—coinciding with the rise of genetic engineering.

Cummins detailed his alternative theory in a 1998 study he coauthored in the journal Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease.

The stakes, the study said, are very grave: the World Health Organization had predicted that drug-resistant bugs would cause a global disease pandemic.

“Biotechnology has effectively opened up highways for horizontal gene transfer and recombination, where previously, there was only restricted access through narrow, tortuous footpaths,” the study said. “These gene transfer highways connect species in every Domain and Kingdom with the microbial populations via the universal mixing vessel, E. coli.”

Cummins’s study said government regulations on GM bugs were “grossly inadequate”. As an example, it mentioned Novo Nordisk, a Danish biotech giant that has admitted to routinely discharging genetically modified microbes into the water and air along with other effluent. (On its Web site, the company says it discharged 10,000 GM microbes per millilitre of waste water and 100,000 GM microbes per cubic metre of air emissions. It says the discharges were safe and okayed by Danish authorities, but it also reports several accidents that released GM microbes into the sewer system.) The study concluded by calling for an independent public inquiry into how biotechnology has contributed to supergerms.

Cummins’s concerns are dismissed by many scientists. Although some acknowledge he may be right about GM bugs contributing to antibiotic resistance, they suggest it is a hypothetical question that isn’t a priority for action.

“I think it is a theoretical possibility and we need to be vigilant about it, but that’s as far as it goes,” Robert Burnham, medical director at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, says in a phone interview from his Vancouver office.

At UBC, professor Julian Davies has no doubt that the main culprit in the rise of virulent new diseases is overuse of antibiotics.

“I’m more worried about natural microbes than genetically modified ones,” he says. But he agrees that genetic engineering may have been a factor: “You can never say it hasn’t been.”

But other scientists are concerned. Charles Greer, a scientist at the National Research Council of Canada, got an Environment Canada grant to study whether or not GM microorganisms could pass their traits to natural germs. He thinks releasing microbes with antibiotic resistance into the environment is a bad idea. “Things like antibiotic-resistance genes, which can be transferred into other organisms, are clearly the types of genes you do not want to introduce into the wild,” he says over the phone from his office in Montreal.

As for GM microbes escaping from labs, Davies says he isn’t too worried. UBC’s microbiology department, where he works, is allowed to police itself. He has never seen a provincial or federal inspection of the department’s labs, he says, and the university doesn’t inspect either. If anything, Davies believes the system is too cautious. “Most people in the department are pretty vigilant,” he adds.

Canada’s top cop for GM labs is Paul Payette. He is director of the Public Health Agency of Canada’s office of laboratory security, where he oversees 3,000 labs—mostly pharmaceutical and other commercial facilities—that import all manner of microbes. Four employees are available to do on-site inspections of all the labs. Payette has no breakdown of how many of the labs are working with biotech organisms versus natural ones. Maureen Best, a senior biosafety consultant at Payette’s office, confesses that spot checks “do not happen very often” and the safety office doesn’t keep tabs on lab accidents. “Unfortunately, there is no national or international reporting mechanism,” she says.

The federal auditor general’s office has expressed concerns about the lax standards. In a 1998 report, it criticized Canadian biosafety rules as being weaker than those in the U.S. and called on the lab-security office to do a review of every lab in the country to verify if the safety guidelines were being respected. (Payette said he wasn’t sure if the review was done; later, he wrote in an e-mail that the review had not been conducted.)

Meanwhile, university lab technicians across the country are full of horror stories about the facilities where they work: injuries, fires, explosions, old and faulty equipment, widely varying safety standards.

“There are human errors all the time,” says Hélène Laliberté, a union official at the University of Montreal who represents 200 lab technicians, on the phone from her office. “Safety regulations are not a big priority.”

Maryann DeFrancis, a union health-and-safety rep for technicians at the University of Toronto, says: “It’s our members’ lives at stake. There should be a more rigorous approach.”

And Kevin Whittaker, a health-and-safety union rep at McGill University, says from his office: “Guidelines are fine. The problem is they are not always adhered to. There is nothing to enforce them. It’s very lax.”

At UBC, lab technicians are not organized into a union. The university responded to a freedom-of-information request for records on lab-safety policy, inspections, and accidents by demanding a $2,012 processing fee.

Simon Fraser University responded to a freedom-of-information request with a letter saying it knows of no accidents at its GM labs in the past two years. It also sent its latest annual biosafety report, which says containment equipment in the labs is certified annually. The labs dispose of microorganisms by heating them at high temperature in a machine called an autoclave, then tossing them in the garbage or having them sent to a landfill site. The university has no record of inspections of the autoclaves, and a table for results of such inspections is left blank in the report.

At the EPA in Denver, Suzanne Wuerthele says lab safety is a big worry for her. “There are no [government] inspections to my knowledge of the facilities that do this, and we don’t even know who they are,” she says from her office. Wuerthele is especially concerned about how GM microbes are disposed of by labs. It is typical, she says, for labs to flush them down the drain or toss them in the trash after they are autoclaved or sterilized. The goal is, typically, to kill 99.9999 percent of the microbes, but Wuerthele says it is normal to have survivors because of the huge numbers of germs created. “If you make 50 tonnes of something, you may still wind up with a fairly large number of organisms still alive,” she says.

Despite the revolution in biotechnology of the 1990s, the last public debate about the safety of GM research took place more than 30 years ago. The setting was the rustic Asilomar Conference Center at the tip of California’s scenic Monterey Peninsula, where 140 biologists and regulators gathered in February 1975 amid grazing deer and barking seals to debate the safety of the fledgling technology of genetic engineering.

Known ever since as “Asilomar”, the conference was provoked by worries that Frankenstein-type genetic monsters would wreak havoc if they got into nature. The participants formulated strict guidelines that were adopted in 1976 by the National Institutes of Health, requiring tight physical confinement of many biotech experiments and forbidding genetic research with cancer viruses. But Asilomar was barely over before the scientific community, eyeing the lucrative new technology, started lobbying the NIH to loosen its guidelines, saying they went too far.
In the early 1980s, the NIH agreed to gut its rules, allowing genetic engineering to be done under loose voluntary safety guidelines and dropping the ban on research on cancer viruses. Canada adopted similar voluntary guidelines.

Although biotechnology was still in its infancy back then, the rules remain essentially unchanged today, even though a series of lab accidents has dramatically highlighted the dangers. Perhaps the worst case was in 1977, when lab contamination in Russia is believed to have led to the reemergence of the Spanish influenza virus, which had killed 20 to 50 million people in 1918 and 1919.

Two years later, an accidental release of anthrax at a Soviet military lab in the Ural Mountains killed 64 people.

In 2003, SARS escaped top-security labs in Singapore, Taiwan, and China, prompting a World Health Organization probe that found few countries have adequate biosafety practices.

And since 9/11, concerns about biosafety have heightened, thanks, ironically, to $7.5 billion in new U.S. and Canadian funding for research into defences against biological terrorism. Biowar experts say even the high-security labs doing much of this research, a lot of it involving genetic engineering, have sloppy practices, and the chances of an accident have shot up with all the new research.

“The controls are pretty lax,” says Susan Wright, a leading bioterror expert at Princeton University who is writing a history of biowar. “The regulations are not very enforced. I just don’t see them regulating with any regularity.”

Last October, the Sunshine Project, an Austin, Texas–based biowar watchdog group, released a troubling survey of 400 GM labs at universities, private companies, and government institutions that got U.S. grants for research on bioterror. It found only four percent fully complied with safety guidelines.

“Disregard for federal recommendations is rampant,” the group reported.In a follow-up study last February, the Sunshine Project found that only three percent of scientists studying biowar germs had ever gotten a grant to work with such bugs before. “Too many scientists with too little training are handling agents that are too dangerous for their experience,” the study noted.

In Winnipeg, Canada’s top-security virology lab shows the kind of problems even the safest facilities can have. Three weeks after it opened in 1999, the $172-million federal complex, one of only 15 Biosafety Level 4 labs in the world equipped to handle the deadliest microbes known, accidentally spilled 2,000 litres of unsterilized waste water into the Winnipeg sewer system.
In a bizarre reminder of Soviet efforts to cover up the Chernobyl disaster, the lab didn’t disclose the accident publicly for two weeks, prompting angry Winnipeggers to hold a meeting to demand independent oversight of the sprawling complex, which is located in a mixed residential-industrial neighbourhood in the city centre.

The outside oversight never happened, but an audit declared the lab was safe.
“We made the appropriate changes to make sure that could never happen again,” spokeswoman Kelly Keith says on the phone from the lab. “We are really one of the top labs in the world—if not the top lab—in terms of containment.”

But just months later, in January 2000, another spill released 100 litres of lab waste inside the facility. And in 2003, the lab sparked international concern after word emerged of a possible SARS contamination accident there. (Keith says that to this day the lab doesn’t know if it experienced a containment failure at the time or not.) The lab was again in the news last March when a courier truck crashed in central Winnipeg on the way to the facility while transporting anthrax, influenza, and tuberculosis. Several blocks were cordoned off before authorities announced nothing had spilled.

It all makes Cummins wonder. If a Level 4 lab can have so many screw-ups, what kind of surprises lurk in less secure places? “We have grown very careless,” he notes. “It is as if workers and the public are really insignificant.”

Urbane Analysis: Today University of Washington President Mark Emmert announced the abandonment of an initiative to develop a regional biocontanimant laboratory - which had been derided by "not in my backyard" neighborhood groups. Let's be clear about this: the proposed lab models exactly the kind of practices we need to see uniformly adopted in the biotechnology industry. Unfortunately these neighbors may well have "cut off their noses to spite their faces" because this kind of capability would well be benign in comparison to the many questionable practices of biotechnology firms - and development of this important capability would be an opportunity for dialogue - maybe even a long-overdue "Asilomar II" regarding bioethics. This would not only be beneficial for Seattle - it would quite possibly be crucial for the entire planet.

But maybe we shouldn't be so hard on the neighbors, particularly in light of the shoddy practices inside research labs as outlined in this article. But if the neighbors were to stop and take a long look at what they were really afraid of - they would be welcoming the work of this proposed facility - and actively working to ensure that "Level 3" equivalent precautions coupled with fully informed ethical practices were in place at every laboratory in the world - not just in their backyard.

Oh, and P.S.: In the interests of full disclosure - way to go, Uncle Joe!

Norway cuts Uganda aid, ups investment

Tilapia to the rescue: enough to feed millions

Norway has announced suspension of development aid to Uganda, joining Great Britain in moving from expression of concern - to action against the regime of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni. It is a small amount, some $5 million - but it is a large symbollic step:

"Our support to Uganda is aimed at reducing poverty, and we have seen that process weakened by a lack of progress in certain areas," Norwegian ambassador Tore Gjos told Reuters.

Meanwhile, a Norwegian company has announced they will spend approximately triple the amount of the suspended aid grants on a private investment in Uganda - development of the largest fish hatchery in sub-Saharan Africa.

Urbane Analysis: That's the way to do it, boost the African economies while feeding the people - while (this is key) keeping the money out of the pockets of dictators.

Hinderaker Stands Up to Mainstream Media's Lame Propaganda

Power Line's John Hinderaker: Conservative Action Hero

First it was Abu Ghraib, then Guantanamo, now the Wilson/Plame Affair. Mainstream media's coordinated drip campaigns against the White House are interminable. What really sucks about this is the silence from Republican members of Congress and the Senate. It seems that none have the temerity to carry any water for George W. Bush.

At least conservative commentators have stepped up. Ann Coulter has done a great job, as usual. And now John Hinderaker has shown what a first team player he is, with this posting on Power Line. Attaway John!

Power Line July 17, 2005
Journalistic Malpractice. Again.

The quality of the reporting on the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame story has been appalling. It raises in stark form the question whether "mainstream" reporters get facts wrong because they are ill-informed, or because they are counting on their readers being ill-informed.
This Seattle Times piece by Bloomberg reporters Holly Rosenkrantz and William Roberts is a case in point. Purporting to be a neutral analysis of the Wilson/Plame controversy, it begins with this astonishing claim:
Two-year-old assertions by former ambassador Joseph Wilson regarding Iraq and uranium, which lie at the heart of the controversy over who at the White House identified a covert U.S. operative, have held up in the face of attacks by supporters of presidential adviser Karl Rove.
"Huh?" say our readers, who know better. How about the Senate Intelligence Committee report? Good question, but one that Rosenkrantz and Roberts have anticipated. They write:
[T]he Senate panel conclusions didn't discredit Wilson. The committee concluded that the Niger intelligence information wasn't solid enough to be included in the State of the Union speech. It added that Wilson's report didn't change the minds of analysts on either side of the issue, while also concluding that an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate "overstated what the Intelligence Community knew about Iraq's possible procurement attempts."
This is a bizarre mischaracterization of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, which you can read in its entirety here, as it relates to Wilson. Let's recall, first of all, what the "two-year-old assertions" by Joseph Wilson were. Wilson started this whole affair with an autobiographical op-ed in the New York Times dated July 6, 2003. The piece was titled "What I Didn't Find In Africa," and it purported to be Wilson's personal testimony to the effect that Saddam Hussein never tried to buy uranium from Niger. Wilson wrote:
[I]n January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.
The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.
The thrust of Wilson's attack on the Bush administration was that the famous "sixteen words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech--"The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"--were untrue. Note that Bush said that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa, not that it had succeeded.
What did the Senate Intelligence Committee's report say about Wilson's trip to Niger? The following, at p. 8 of the report's "Niger" section:
The intelligence report based on the former ambassador's [Wilson's] trip was disseminated on March 8, 2002 ... The intelligence report indicated that former Nigerian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mayaki...said that in June 1999, [redacted] businessman, approached him and insisted that Mayaki meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Niger and Iraq. The intelligence report said that Mayaki interpreted "expanding commercial relations" to mean that the delegation wanted to discuss uranium yellowcake sales.
So what Joe Wilson reported orally to the CIA was exactly what President Bush said in his State of the Union address, and the opposite of what Wilson wrote in the New York Times. Iraq did indeed try to buy uranium from Niger, as Niger's former Prime Minister told Wilson. It is hard to imagine how the Senate report could discredit Wilson any more thoroughly.
It did, though. The Senate committee found that Wilson was an unreliable witness in several respects. When Wilson talked to the Committee's staff, he related a version of events that was different from the official CIA report that summarized his oral debriefing, and it also contradicted the recollections of the relevant CIA employees. The committee wrote, at p. 9 of its report:
When the former ambassador spoke to Committee staff, his description of his findings differed from the DO intelligence report and his account of information provided to him by the CIA differed from the CIA officials' accounts in some respects. First, the former ambassador described his findings to Committee staff as more directly related to Iraq and specifically, as refuting the possibility that Niger could have sold uranium to Iraq and that Iraq approached Niger to purchase uranium. The intelligence report...did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium.
See also p. 38 of the report, where the Committee notes that most analysts understood Wilson's report from Niger as supporting the original CIA concerns about a possible uranium deal between Niger and Iraq.
And that's not all. The Senate committee also found that Wilson falsely leaked to the Washington Post the claim that certain documents purporting to show uranium sales between Niger and Iraq were forgeries because "the names were wrong and the dates were wrong," when in fact, he had never seen the documents and was not familiar with their contents. See p. 10 of the Committee's report:
Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have "misspoken" to the reporter when he said he concluded the documents were "forged." He said he may have become confused about his own recollection....
The Senate Intelligence Committee also found that Wilson lied about the role played by his wife, Valerie Plame, in his trip to Niger. Wilson wrote in his book, ironically titled The Politics of Truth, "Valerie had nothing to do with the matter. She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." In fact, however, the Committee reported at p. 4:
[D]ocuments provided to the committee indicate that [Wilson's] wife, a CPD employee, suggested his name for the trip. The CPD reports officer told Committee staff that the former ambassador's wife "offered up his name" and a memorandum to the Deputy Chief of the CPD on February 12, 2002 from the former ambassador's wife says, "my husband has good relations with both the PM [prime minister] and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."
The former ambassador was selected for the 1999 trip after his wife mentioned to her supervisors that her husband was planning a business trip to Niger in the near future and might be willing to use his contacts in the region.
So, to sum up: the Senate Intelligence Committee's report shows that: 1) Wilson lied in the New York Times about what he told the CIA after he returned from Niger. In fact, far from debunking the concern that Iraq may have tried to buy uranium from Niger, Wilson reported that Niger's former Prime Minister told him that Iraq had made just such an overture in 1999. 2) Wilson lied when he leaked a report to the Washington Post about documents he had not even seen. 3) Wilson lied when he said that his wife Valerie "had nothing to do with" his being chosen to go to Niger.
In the face of this evidence, which is evident to anyone who takes the trouble to read the Committee's report, Rosenkrantz and Roberts blithely assert that Wilson's assertions about Africa and uranium "have held up in the face of attacks," and that "the Senate panel conclusions didn't discredit Wilson." Having read the Senate Intelligence Committee's report with care, I can think of only two possible explanations: either Rosenkrantz and Roberts have not read the report, or they are trying to mislead their readers. In either case, this is a grotesque instance of journalistic malpractice. Sadly, however, it is not untypical of the quality of the liberal media's reporting on the Wilson/Plame affair.

Jimmy Kolker Tells Ugandan People "Warning Light is Flashing"

"Yes, I am worried... These are serious violations of democratic principles and mean that they are worrying signs." - U.S. Ambassador to Uganda Jimmy Kolker

American Ambassador: Uganda in Big Trouble Over Third Term

The Monitor (Kampala)
July 12, 2005

(Outgoing U.S. ambassador to Uganda Mr. Jimmy Kolker was hosted on Tonight with Andrew Mwenda Live on 93.3 KFM last week and spoke out on the controversial third term campaign for President Yoweri Museveni. Daily Monitor's Emmanuel Gyezaho transcribed the interview.)

You say in your speech celebrating America's 229th Independence anniversary that we must be alert to some red warning lights that are flashing. What are they?

In my speech I talked about two things at first. One is that in procurement, privatisation decisions, the national interest is sometimes sacrificed to personal, partisan interests of some of the decision makers, of the political leadership and that there are some examples where there has been real greed where people have been looking to serve their personal interests rather than national interests.

What is the position of the U.S. government on such warning lights if leaders sell public enterprises to themselves at give away prices when they allocate the budget for their own political advantage?

The question isn't what the U.S. is going to do about it. The question is that Ugandans need to be alert because of your own history, because of the generally good situation that Ugandans find themselves in. This is not a dictatorship; it's not a country in which people do not have access to ways of expressing their views. They do have access to those but at the same time, the warning light is flashing.

The Movement system in Uganda right now is very popular but the government is holding a referendum, when there is no campaigning. Do you think the public will vote for this change or the government is simply trying to hold this referendum as a gimmick to sanctify a continuation of the Movement system?

I hope very much that people will vote. I hope the government and the opposition will campaign and participate in the referendum. I hope that people will realise that multi-party competition offers a tremendous opportunity to Ugandans to influence government policy. I have been disappointed in the campaign in fact I think both the government and those people who are recommending a boycott are missing the point. In the U.S. political competition is a way to strengthen the citizens voice. It's a way to give alternative views, get better ideas into politics. But no one in Uganda is expressing that vision.

What does the U.S. think about the proposed constitutional amendments to remove term limits from Uganda's constitution?

We are a country which has term limits. Term limits are a method by which institutions and democratic principles can survive an individual. It is clear that the current stability and freedom that Ugandans have came after 1986. There has been a steady development, which we recognise and we praise the ability of citizens to influence their government. The question is will that survive the current president?
Is President Museveni the only guarantor that those institutions and that sense of prosperity will continue in Uganda? If so, it's very dangerous because one day he will no longer be president. And if those institutions and those positive aspects of Ugandan society cannot survive him personally, then Uganda is in big trouble.
The term limits gives publics as well as leaders a chance to go out saying, 'I've done my part; here is my successor I would like you to elect. Here is the platform on which that person is going to be elected so that my legacy can continue.' To me this is a very important principle in any country but it is certainly important in a country like Uganda that has never had that happen. You have never had a leader leave power and say, 'Here is my vision which is going to be continued by my successor'.
It's just been the opposite that every successor has tried to erase all the vestiges of the vision of the predecessor and people have suffered for that. It's been a situation in which there are clear winners and clear losers and it seems to me that term limits allows a system in which there can be winners, who are the successors who win power but also those who leave power can consider themselves winners. Because what they have accomplished can be persevered and can be honored by the fact that those institutions and policies survive them.

What is the position of the US in simple terms, does the U.S. favour term limits remaining or being removed?

Constitutions and elections are acts of sovereignty. It would be presumptuous of me to say that on a given vote the U.S. took a position, but we didn't take a position on that vote. But I believe and my country believes that term limits contribute to democracy and that term limits serve a constructive purpose both in my own country and in other countries especially African countries where the questions of succession are so difficult.

What does the US think about the likely consequences, does it see a lot of positive outcome from removing term limits, and does it see warring signs?

We've followed this debate and the process closely - the timetable established by the government, the constitutional review process and the resultant Cabinet White Paper. The deadlines have never been met and the process has dragged on much longer. The question of what is in the constitutional amendment bill has been changed a number of times, whether there is one bill or three bills, whether constitutional amendments will be subject to a referendum or voted by parliament.
All these things have changed so many times that as an observer of Uganda's scene I would say that citizens who wanted to influence their government on this issue would have a hard time doing so because its been hard for me. I have a whole staff that follows these things, I personally take an interest, I read the papers, I live in Kampala, I know the politicians, I talk to people like yourself and its been hard for me to figure out what exactly is going on, what the government's plan is in terms of the transition and I can imagine it would be harder for the average Ugandan who doesn't have all those advantages to figure out what's actually going on. I have to say that we have been uncomfortable with the process.

Does it worry you about Uganda's future, this process, the way it has dragged? Do you live worried or do you live optimistic?

I live with a wonderful sense of Ugandans and the potential of the country. I do live worried that the potential is not being realised and that there are some as I call them warning lights that may mean that it will be harder to reach that potential in the future. But I've enjoyed my time in Uganda. I've felt very free here, I've been able to travel to 46 districts, and I've been able to meet people and say what I want and listen to what they have to say without hindrance. I would look at the positive side. There is nothing here that is hopeless which you can say that oh, the U.S. has to give up on Uganda.

If President Museveni invited you over to State House for coffee and said well, Jimmy you have been here for many years, what advice to do you give me, do you think I should run or retire? What would you tell him?

I thank the President that I have had access to him. I have had coffee at State House and I do give him advice and I don't broadcast that advice over the radio. He has asked my opinion on some things. I have offered opinion when I haven't been asked on other things. He's been a friend of the U.S. and he has been open to U.S. ambassadors historically and he has been to me. He hasn't asked that question and I think that he has in his own mind decided over that question. He doesn't need my advice on that.

When President Museveni visited the White House, U.S. President George Bush did advise that the U.S. would like to see a peaceful transition in Uganda in which case they would prefer to see him retire peacefully and handover to a successor. Is this correct?

I was at the meeting and I am confident in what I say about peaceful transitions and the importance of term limits because I know what my President believes and what he said.

What did President Bush tell President Museveni?

He talked about the American system. What he said is, "Fellow rancher I know you would want to go back to your cattle one day. The Parliamentary report on election violence has not be tabled in Parliament, an election is coming up, which means the government has not addressed the concerns on election violence.

What is your feeling in regard to election violence and electoral malpractices?

Yes I am worried. That is why I brought it up in my speech. This is clearly antidemocratic if people are intimidated. If there is violence in connection with free speech, in connection with campaigning, competing for office, keeping voters from one candidate from voting, encouraging illegal voting by others, as the report indicated. These are serious violations of democratic principles and mean that they are worrying signs.

Urbane Analysis: The art of statecraft throughout the centuries has cultivated a very careful opacity to words spoken by sitting ambassadors in the nations to which they have been sent. Think about it this way, ambassadors are guests in that country. If you were invited to dinner at someone's home, would you criticize the dishes and the curtains? That is why a sitting ambassador going on national radio in that country to speak in this way is clearly a strong signal to the Museveni regime. And no doubt Museveni knows it. And if he doesn't, he should pick up the phone, and call Tony Blair. The British Prime Minister will put it to him quite plainly.

Karl Rove, Whistleblower about Joe Wilson's Lies

Karl Rove, Whistleblower
He told the truth about Joe Wilson.
Opinion Journal.com Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign.

Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity.

But it appears Mr. Rove didn't even know Ms. Plame's name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.
On the "no underlying crime" point, moreover, no less than the New York Times and Washington Post now agree. So do the 36 major news organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller out of jail.

"While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear--at least on the public record--that a crime took place," the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.

The same can't be said for Mr. Wilson, who first "outed" himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous "16 words" on the subject in that year's State of the Union address.

Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.

But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report.

The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn't even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.

About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain's Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."

In short, Joe Wilson hadn't told the truth about what he'd discovered in Africa, how he'd discovered it, what he'd told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.

If there's any scandal at all here, it is that this entire episode has been allowed to waste so much government time and media attention, not to mention inspire a "special counsel" probe. The Bush Administration is also guilty on this count, since it went along with the appointment of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in an election year in order to punt the issue down the road. But now Mr. Fitzgerald has become an unguided missile, holding reporters in contempt for not disclosing their sources even as it becomes clearer all the time that no underlying crime was at issue.

As for the press corps, rather than calling for Mr. Rove to be fired, they ought to be grateful to him for telling the truth.

Urbane Analysis: Thanks Karl!

On Reality and Comprehension in Northern Uganda

Be sure to check out the new website of Uganda Conflict Action Network(Uganda-CAN)

A notable new effort, and they say it best themselves...

Uganda Conflict Action Network (Uganda-CAN) seeks to:

Raise awareness about the war in northern Uganda, particularly highlighting the realities on the ground and the voices of Ugandans caught in the midst of war.

Take creative and targeted action to lobby policymakers in the United States to push for a comprehensive peaceful resolution to the war in northern Uganda and an end to its consequent suffering.

Work in partnership with operating humanitarian organizations to provide relief and other forms of assistance to alleviate the unnecessary human suffering in northern Uganda.

Build an effective broad-based grassroots network of concerned, outraged citizens committed to monitoring and using their power to work for peace and renewal in the Great Lakes Region of Africa and beyond.

Urbane Analysis: Attention Left Wingers: see how these fine young protestors at Uganda-CAN have World Vision on their radar? A good move, you should follow their leadership in this kind of constructive peacemaking. And it would be more than a nice gesture, since the U.S. has (lamentably) an eroding reputation as an "honest broker" in this conflict - insofar as it has been a decades-long financial prop to the Museveni regime, which in turn has a vested interest in perpetuating this conflict to deflect the spotlight on horrible results/ accountability/ progress in advancing Uganda. Want to learn more about that? Then the Uganda-CAN website would be worth your time. There is a free market of ideas out there: Go shopping! That's more than those Ugandan kids in the picture above, lined-up for their measly daily ration of three liters of water, can hope for based on the horrible status quo imposed by the Museveni regime.

Health Disaster in Museveni's Uganda: Cholera in Kampala Slum

A spokesman for the Ugandan health ministry, Paul Kaggwa, said health officials had tried to evacuate places prone to cholera outbreaks, especially in Kampala, but unnamed politicians had frustrated their efforts. - Reuters AlertNet

Cholera outbreak downs dozens in Uganda
Independent Online
July 11 2005
Kampala - Cholera outbreaks in four different areas of Uganda, including a Kampala slum, have killed at least 38 people and infected more than 900 others since the beginning of June, officials said on Monday.
Twenty-four people have so far died in the north-western district of Arua, Alfred Driwale, a senior health official in the region, told reporters.A total of 14 others have died in the capital's Katanga slum and in the northern Nebbi and Gulu districts since the cases were first reported early June, officials said.
In addition to the deaths, 905 cases of cholera have been reported in the East African nation, with areas in northern Uganda inhabited by displaced people affected most, according to figures released by the health ministry.
Authorities have since banned selling of cooked food in all the affected areas while 11 schools and two markets have been closed in the Arua district, as a measure to contain the epidemic, Driwale said.
Aid agency Medicine sans frontières (MSF) - Holland said in a statement released here on Monday that acute water shortage in northern Uganda has exacerbated the problem of water-borne diseases."
People live on less than three litres of water per day, though the international acceptable standards are 15 litres...," Peter Muller, the head of MSF-Holland (Doctors without Borders), told reporters."
People have two options to get that little water; either to queue up for more than three hours each day at different water points or venture outside the camp parameters, where they risk falling victims to the roaming rebels of Lord's Resistance Army," the MSF statement added."As a result people collect contaminated water from the streets when its raining and river from rivers and springs that surround the camps, leading to an increase in water-related illnesses," it added.
Cholera is a waterborne disease which causes serious diarrhoea and vomiting and can be fatal if not treated within 24 hours. It can be prevented by washing hands before handling food and avoiding contaminated drinking water.


Death toll from cholera outbreak up in northwest Uganda
People's Daily Online
12 July 2005
Death roll from cholera outbreak has increased to 20 in Arua district, northwester Uganda, according to local media on Monday.
The district health educator, Ronald Ocatre, said the latest victim is a former revenue collector at Arua main market who died at his residence in Gurua village, Arua municipality last week.
Cholera first broke out in the district at the shores of River Nile in Rigbo sub-county last month.
After a week, the disease hit the upland Aca villages in Ogoko sub-county where it killed six people.
The epidemic is spreading throughout the district. its presence has been reported in Taraa, Adumi, River Oli, Aroi Rigbo and Ogoku sub-counties.
The district cholera task force, chaired by resident district commissioner Alfred Ogaba, has asked the municipal council staff led by Mayor Thabit Khalifan, to undertake a door-to-door inspection of sanitary facilities and also rid the town center of rotting garbage.
The health officials have conceded that poor hygiene practices and apathetic attitude of residents have undermined the struggle to control the spread of the disease in the district.
Cholera spreads quickly and can kill within hours.
The intestinal disease causes severe diarrhea, vomiting, muscular cramps and dehydration, and is spreading by water and food that have been contaminated by infected faeces.

Urbane Analysis: Cholera is just part of the total package in Uganda's north - the "triangle of disaster" marking the worst human conditions for human life on the planet, comprising Northern Uganda, Northeastern Congo and Southern Sudan. That cholera is reported in Kampala slums is extraordinarily concerning - and demonstrates how little control and impact the Museveni regime is having on improving the lives of ordinary Ugandans. And one word about the Katanga slum: it is not the worst (and certainly not the largest) slum in Kampala. And it is a place where many outstanding young people in the African Children's Choir received an education and a great deal more opportunity in life. Katanga slum is also a place where conditions are horrible, women are forced into atrocious choices, and HIV/AIDS is everywhere, as are orphans. Welcome to President Museveni's capital city. Update: this report indicates that the death toll is rising - and that the means of transmission is as simple as eating unwashed fruit - a major warning to tourists and travelers.

Accountants are the key to ending Third World poverty

A combination of accountants from donor countries and a strengthened accounting profession in the developing nations can help to underpin the validity of the "audit trail" and ensure that it's clear that the money is going where it should.

by ROB OUTRAM
The Scotsman 7 July 2005

The leaders of the G8 meeting in Gleneagles have the problems of the poorest nations, especially the people of Africa, higher on their agenda than they have ever been before.

Here in Edinburgh this week we have seen nearly a quarter of million people marching peacefully to "make poverty history". Have accountants got anything to do with the search for a solution to Africa's problems? Actually, the answer is yes, and for a number of reasons.

One of the key planks of the Make Poverty History programme is "fair trade". Economic growth is essential to tackle poverty in the long term, and one of the factors underpinning growth and investment is a sound financial infrastructure. Without this, both aid and growth will be seriously compromised.

A combination of accountants from donor countries and a strengthened accounting profession in the developing nations can help to underpin the validity of the "audit trail" and ensure that it's clear that the money is going where it should.

A strong accountancy profession and financial reporting that is widely trusted are also vital in order to attract investment from overseas. The world is moving towards internationally accepted accounting standards, and accountants in developing countries need the appropriate training in order to make use of the opportunities that offers.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland has been involved in helping to build and develop financial skills and institutions around the world for many years now. Many of these projects have taken place in former Soviet countries, such as Russia, Kazakhstan and Armenia, but also in Bangladesh, Tanzania and Uganda.

In Uganda, for example, ICAS worked on a major project funded by the World Bank, helping the Institute of Certified Public Accountants of Uganda to develop its student education curriculum, examination system and continuing professional development for members.

Individual accountants also give their time, often freely, to help developing countries. CA Kathleen McGarva, for example, provided a diary for CA Magazine of her time as a volunteer with the Voluntary Service Overseas organisation. Kathleen took a sabbatical from her job with GlaxoSmithKline to work with VSO in South Africa. After a short "in-country" induction at the township of Alexandria, she worked first in rural Limpopo province at a project set up to aid refugees, mainly from Mozambique and Zimbabwe, and then at an urban project focusing on human rights and the media.

Kathleen wrote that the highs outnumbered the lows.

She said: "One of the really good things was seeing how positive people are given their circumstances. Despite real hardships they do not complain - they make the best of what there is."

ICAS has sponsored another CA, Caroline Macleod, for her first year working with VSO in Namibia. Meanwhile a third CA, Nicola Beattie, signed up to work with the Merlin charity in Sri Lanka, supporting their response to the tsunami disaster. Nicola found her placement through the charity Mango - Management Accounting for Non-Governmental Organisations - which is supported by a number of corporate donors including large accountancy firms.

Nicola said: "I've never been the sort of accountant who is happy staring at spreadsheets all day, but this was rewarding in ways I couldn't have imagined before I started."

Research by Mango shows the importance of financial reporting to the beneficiaries of aid as well as to donors. For example, a newspaper campaign in Uganda explaining to the community how primary schools are funded reduced the "leakage" of central government funds.

In their own way, the likes of Kathleen, Caroline and Nicola are as important to the developing world as the efforts of Live 8's celebrities. But in the long term, the aim of both individual volunteers and the accountancy bodies working on overseas projects must be to share their skills and knowledge so that local people are better equipped to tackle the challenges they face.

• Rob Outram is editor of CA Magazine.

Urbane Analysis: Software like Excel, spot checks and audits using real-time digital photography and video, and e-mail are powerful weapons - that need to be deployed with as much force among the eighteen poorest nations as health and nutrition programs.

The Popular View On Debt Forgiveness in Uganda

Andrew Mwenda believes foreign aid undermines democracy


(BBC) Africans on Africa: Debt 6 July 2005

Each day this week, the BBC is looking at African problems through African eyes.

Here, Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan radio journalist and presenter of a controversial and high-profile nightly radio show, reflects on aid and debt relief.

I was excited when I heard that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had set up a commission to research solutions to the problems afflicting Africa - I felt it was an opportunity to breathe new ideas into the debate on Africa's backwardness.

However I was disappointed.

After months of work they came up with the same old mantras: doubling aid, cancelling debt and reducing trade tariffs and subsidies.

They're ignoring reality. For the last 40 years, Africa's been getting more, not less, aid - we've received more than $500bn. But we are getting poorer not richer.

Let me show you, through the experience of my homeland Uganda how these recommendations don't - and won't - work.

Donor support

Uganda is considered one of Africa's economic success stories. Yet we rely on foreign aid for nearly half the country's budget.

You would assume that Uganda cannot fund its own development. But that's not the case.

The government has got money, but chooses to spend it on political patronage and its army. It doesn't even collect the taxes it is owed.

Allen Kagina, the Commissioner General of Uganda's tax authority, acknowledges that Uganda collects only a fraction of the tax it could.

Uganda was forgiven its debts... as a consequence, government indulged itself in very luxurious expenditure... and invaded Congo and Sudan

"The URA has been lax in collecting," she told me.

"If donors cut off we'd have to collect 100%. We don't have the capacity to do that just yet."

She does believe the URA could fund the national budget - it would be "difficult but it is achievable." And she also said that Uganda should aim to reduce donor support.

But Tony Blair is talking of doubling aid to Africa. Yet some African economies are so small that the amount of aid they're getting is already skewing the economy.

Foreign aid enriches politicians, bureaucrats and aid workers, whose consumption fuels inflation.

The Ugandan government is receiving so much foreign aid that the economy is unable to absorb it. Treasury bills have to be used to suck the money out of the system. As a result, the Central Bank is holding $700m in treasury bills, and the interest on that per annum is $120m - which is incurred by the tax payer.

All in all, a very expensive exercise.

Fair trade

Uganda's Finance Minister Dr Ezra Suruma said the country does consider finding better ways of managing aid to be "very important".

"The problem is what we do with it - whether we invest or consume it," she added.

"We need to invest more in equipment, technology, infrastructure and so on. Aid must be properly used to increase our capacity to produce more income."

And what of Blair's other proposal, fair trade?

Changing tariffs and subsidies in Europe and the USA will not lift Africa's business out of the doldrums.

Again, why don't we learn our lesson? This has been tried already and hasn't worked.

Under the Cotounou Agreement for preferential trade with Europe, for example, Uganda has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union - duty free.

But it's never been fulfilled. In fact, not even one kilogram of Ugandan sugar has been exported to the EU. We can't even grow enough sugar in Uganda to satisfy the domestic market.

It's the domestic environment that holds trade expansion back.

At Ugachick - which produces 400,000 chicks each month and produces meat which it sells both in Uganda and surrounding countries - managing director Aga Sekalala wants to expand - but he needs affordable credit, and with interest rates up to 18% this is not available.

Then there's the physical infrastructure.

Last week someone stole the electric cable linking Ugachick to the grid. It took five days to fix it, and it only happened then because Ugachick provided the manpower to carry the poles.

"The infrastructure, the roads, power - all of this is our headache, when it should be the government's," he said.

Entrepreneurs like Aga should be the engines for creating wealth in Uganda.

If he expanded, so would his contributions to the revenue. He's energetic and ready to move forward.

But there is no imperative for the government to help him. Any financial gap in the budget, and they only need to turn to the international donors to fill it.

Unsustainable debt

If only foreign aid could be shifted from lining corrupt politicians' and bureaucrats' pockets to developing private enterprise, then Africa would have hope.

And what of the third of the Blair Commission proposals - debt cancellation? Many people think that debt cancellation is a clear cut solution to Africa's indebtedness.

But think again. Common sense tells you it's wrong to reward bad economic behaviour.

My friend Ben Kavuya, a money lender here in Kampala, deals with bad debtors by taking their property, their collateral.

He believes if you forgive bad debts it teaches bad lessons, creating a culture of defaulting.

That's certainly exactly what happened with Uganda.

In 1998 Uganda was forgiven its debts through the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.

As a consequence, government indulged itself in very luxurious expenditure - increasing the size of Parliament - and invaded Congo and Sudan.

And not only that, it went on a renewed borrowing spree and today, seven years later, Uganda's debt has more than doubled and now it is unsustainable.

Parliament is so foreign aid-dependent that even the chairs and desks are funded by Denmark.

And worse, with so much of our country's budget in the hands of the foreign aid donors, the power of Ugandan voters to hold our government to account has been usurped by international creditors - precisely because he who pays the piper calls the tune.

In this way, foreign aid undermines democracy.

Foreign aid does not help the poor out of their misery - it exacerbates their problems and prolongs their agony.

Taxpayers in the west should not be asked to pay to keep corrupt and incompetent governments in power.

Urbane Analysis: No truer words were ever spoken. Update: And check out this from Seattle blogger Ron Hebron.

Stop begging, Gadhafi tells African Union Leaders

“Begging won't make a future for Africa.” ~Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi

Monday, July 4, 2005 Updated at 2:34 PM EDT

Toronto Globe & Mail (Associated Press)

Sirte, Libya — Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi told African countries to stop “begging” from the rich and to co-operate more in a blunt speech before a summit of the continents' leaders Monday ahead of a gathering the G8 countries due to focus on African debt relief.

Leaders from the Group of Eight industrialized countries meet Wednesday in Scotland, as protesters have been demanding action to curb African poverty. Over the weekend, rock stars and celebrities held concerts around the globe urging world leaders to eradicate the continent's debt.

Some of the 47 African heads of state gathered in this Libyan coastal city for the start of an African Union summit were pessimistic the G8 would come through with help.

The G8 countries are burdened with their own issues and “solving the world's and poor countries' issues are bigger than their ability,” Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir told The Associated Press.

But if it can, the G8 should “not only lift the interest on debt but the debts themselves, because they are the biggest catastrophe facing African countries,” he said.

“Pleading to the G8 to lift debts won't make a future for Africa,” Mr. Gadhafi said in his opening speech to the gathering of some 3,000 delegates. “We need co-operation between the big and the small countries in the world.

“Begging won't make a future for Africa.”


Olusegun Obasanjo with George W. Bush

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo praised the Libyan leader's blunt comments. “I liked Gadhafi's work," he said. "It seems he is back to his old way.”

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the summit in his address that the G8 summit's focus on Africa is “very welcome.”

“But it is the World Summit in two months' time that holds the greatest promise,” he said, referring to a gathering of world leaders in September during the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Mr. Annan wants that summit to review progress toward the goals set at the Millennium Summit in 2000 – most important, to cut by half the number of people living in dire poverty by 2015 – and to make key decisions about how the United Nations and other institutions can best deal with the new threats to global security.

“This is the most important African summit, ever for it concentrates on real problems in the continent which are security and poverty,” President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe told AP.

The African Union summit was expected to send an appeal to the G8 to help curb poverty and ensure security. The leaders are also to discuss conflicts on the continent, particularly the bloodshed in the western Sudanese region of Darfur crisis, and issue and international appeal to help the continent battle disease and famine.

They are also pushing for Africa to get at least one permanent seat on the UN Security Council.

Mr. Gadhafi proposed rotating a seat among the African countries, “every one or two years, and not to be given to any one particular country.”

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso and the Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa also attended the opening of the Sirte summit.

The 53-country African Union was created in 2002 as the successor to the Organization of African Unity.

Modelled after the European Union with an executive commission, a pan-African parliament and a court of justice, the African Union is based in Addis Ababa. Its focus is to spread democracy, human rights and economic development across the African continent.

Urbane Analysis: Notice that this crowd - which includes dictators, tyrants, thugs, thiefs, killers (and their enablers) omitted one organization (the World Bank) from their guest list? And why shouldn't they, given that their chief financier has publicly stated that 35% of spending on aid (alone) is lost to corruption - with responsibility for that resting squarely on the African leaders who stole it. Even good guys like Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is pushing against an endemically corrupt bureacracy (which is in turn enabled by western corporations willing to be the corruptors) need to speak out much more forcefully against the theft and graft which is the REAL cause of Africa's situation.

Because one thing is for certain, the African Union crowd will cry and whine about every BUT their complicity in Africa's crisis.