adminJeffrey Gogo Climate Story
AS rich countries dither on climate finance, Zimbabwe has come up with radical proposals — taxing scores of international mining companies operating in Africa. Others will call it resource nationalism. That’s what Environment, Water and Climate Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri told a meeting of African environment ministers in Tanzania earlier this month.
The ministers, and other high government officials, were deliberating on Africa’s plans and expectations for the watershed Paris climate conference in December, where a new global climate deal will be sealed. “. . . a levy could be charged especially to multi-lateral companies who have historically caused climate change on all exported extractive natural resources and the funds put into a common fund for adaptation in Africa,” Minister Muchinguri-Kashiri proposed.
“Zimbabwe would like to drive a motion that will call for Africa to establish a regionally common mid and long-term vision to be shared by African countries and their development partners. This should be based on the ownership of African countries’ natural resources . . . ”
Many of the world’s foremost polluters including the United States, the 28-member European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Russia and Canada have all communicated to the UN their mitigation plans, the foundation on which the new climate agreement will be built.
However, all were silent and at best non-committal on finance and technology transfer, two issues considered by Africa as indispensable to a fair and equitable deal. Now, as Paris draws nearer, it’s become clearer Africans will have to do much more to get the industrialised countries of the West, historically responsible for fuelling climate change, to fulfil their funding obligations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Pay up
Taking a different approach, Minister Muchinguri-Kashiri is poignantly drawn to forcing foreign owned mining conglomerates to take on responsibility that is being neglected by governments in their home countries. There are no figures yet to go with the proposed tax. In a way, however, the plan indirectly compensates for the inaction from industrialised states.
But can she mobilise adequate support in Africa for her mining tax plan? That, for now, appears far-fetched. Africa’s views on resource nationalism, even in the lightest form as proposed by Minister Muchinguri-Kashiri, is divergent, influenced in many ways by colonial history.
Africa is regrettably divided on colonial lines, Francophone Africa on the one side and Anglophone on the other, and Lusophone on the fence, a truth that its leaders casually reject. Her ultra proposal is certain to elicit derision, suspicion, and even contempt from some quarters in Africa and beyond, mainly along master and slave colonial lines.
Her ideas nonetheless represent a kind of revolutionary approach that for long has been missing in the multi-lateral climate negotiations. Such thinking is crucial to accelerating global action to address the manifold challenges caused by climate change on the continent. And it is easy to understand the factors influencing her radicalism. She hails from a country that in the last 15 years has asserted control over its natural resources through far-reaching indigenisation laws.
Now, she intends to export her Zimbabwean experiences to the rest of Africa, for good reason.
Romantic Economists
Twenty years since the climate talks started, Africa’s social and economic development remains stuck in the mud, impeded by climate change induced hunger, poverty and malnutrition.
Economists at the World Bank and elsewhere who romanticise about Africa’s so called economic growth, estimated at 4,4 percent on the average in the past 5 years, well, they are indeed romanticising. As those economists continue to trumpet the growth numbers, two thirds of Africa’s 1 billion people remain entrenched in poverty and hunger, never enjoying the so called economic rise.
Africa needs to understand Minister’s tax plan in the proper context. Africa feeds the world’s mineral hunger, but minerals do not do the same for millions of its impoverished children. Foreign-owned mining companies are not doing enough to end Africa’s suffering. In addition to 25 percent corporate income tax, mining companies in Zimbabwe pay royalties in the range 2 to 10 percent.
In Burkina Faso, royalty rates range between 3 to 4 percent; in Ghana 5 percent; Mali 3 percent while in South Africa royalty is profit-based, according to a 2012 report by the African Development Bank (AfDB). The DRC, one of Africa’s richest countries resources-wise, levies just one to 2,5 percent in royalties while the rates range between 3 to 5 percent in Botswana and Zambia.
On the average, royalties for Africa are just 3,5 percent. By any measure, Africa’s royalty rates, mainly influenced by the World Bank’s ruinous policies that favour private capital, are very low. That explains why the continent’s mineral wealth is not equally shared, concentrated only in the hands of a few highly profitable multi-nationals.
Her tax call resonates with the chilling statistics that defiantly show how Africa’s minerals continue to line the shameless pockets of those unwilling to finance adaptation and mitigation for the continent’s poor. Africa’s call for international climate finance at Paris may be blown away by the wind, but the plan to have foreign-owned mining companies pay for adaptation should not.
Clearly, the West has contemptuously refused to grasp the full extent to which our lives, jobs and environment are sensitive to a changing climate. Effective decision-making will be needed in many areas if we are to build a climate resilient future. Taxing their companies operating in Africa would be a radically acceptable effective decision.
For Minister Muchinguri-Kashiri, there are a few other ways for Africa to self-fund its climate programmes. After implementing the continent-wide tax, “then we could talk of strategies that can achieve results that promote sustainable and comprehensive economic growth,” she said.
In her address to the Tanzania meeting, the Minister rejected the world’s 2 degrees Celsius temperature goal as woefully inadequate to mitigating climate change’s impacts on Africa. Instead, she advocated a 1,5 degrees Celsius temperature goal. Since 1990, greenhouse gases emissions have risen over 45 percent. At this rate, the world is on course for an unsustainable above 4 degrees Celsius warming by 2100, warned the UN panel on climate change’s Fifth Assessment Report last year, the most authoritative communication on climate change.
The situation will be worse in southern Africa, the report said, with warming of up to 6 degrees Celsius, leading to massive crop losses, water scarcity, disease outbreaks and hunger.
God is faithful.
Online Reporter