POVERTY: DRC-CONGO: Thousands flee election tension

BRAZZAVILLE, 6 December 2011 (IRIN)

 Photo: Laudes Martial Mbon/IRIN
Seeking security: thousands of DRC residents are fleeing potential election conflict

At least 3,500 people have arrived by boat in recent days in Congo’s capital, fearing violence in the run-up to the announcement, due before midnight on 6 December, of the outcome of the presidential election in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), according to an official.
Yves Ikiaye, a captain in Congo’s immigration service, said those crossing the Congo River, which separates Brazzaville from the DRC capital, Kinshasa, between 4 and 6 December included politicians and their families, diplomats and UN officials.
“We came here to escape war,” said Dorcas Mukaku, a schoolgirl, who arrived with her two younger sisters.
“The Lubas [one of DRC’s ethnic groups] said that if Etienne Tshisekedi was not elected they would set Kinshasa on fire and shed blood,” she told IRIN.
Others, “who support President Joseph Kabila [who is running for re-election], said it had to be him or no-one”, she said.
“I decided to leave my parents and studies behind to observe the situation from afar and save my life. I am too young and have nothing to do with what’s going on,” she said.
However, Congo’s Interior Minister, Raymond Mboulou, said: “We are not in a crisis situation,” adding that it was normal for people from Kinshasa to travel to Brazzaville.
Brazzaville’s chief of police, Général Benoît Moundélé-Ngollo, said a special camp would be set up if the numbers arriving increased significantly.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=94406

POVERTY: Do tax havens contribute to African poverty?

Apr 8, 2011
Tax havens have been blamed (and lauded in some quarters) for many things. But a new book that is causing quite a stir says they are a key reason behind African poverty and underdevelopment.
“Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World” by Nicholas Shaxson argues among other things that they are “deep drains of development.”




“Poverty in Africa cannot be understood without understanding the role of offshore. The world’s worst war for years has been the civil conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is tied in with the wholesale looting of its mineral resources via tax havens,” he writes.
The amount of money in tax havens has been estimated at $11.5 trillion by the Tax Justice Network, a respected and independent advocacy group that monitors such trends. Much of it is money that has been channeled illicitly to the developed world from the developing world and by some estimates exceeds the amount of aid that goes into regions such as Africa.
The broad brush — and this is a simplication of the overall argument — is that tax havens enable the flight of scarce capital from Africa to other regions, stunting the continent’s ability to develop on a range of fronts. Such havens inclue not only tropical destinations like the Cayman Islands but the City of London and the U.S. state of Delaware.
And global efforts to curtail them, a subject we have written on before, have been largely ineffective. Resource-rich countries are also, for a range of reasons, more prone to capital outflows to tax havens and other offshore institutions. And Africa is rich in resources.
Shaxson’s work is in many ways a counter-argument to the “aid is bad” consensus that is taking hold in some quarters. (See, for example, Dambisa Moyo’s “Dead Aid”.) Shaxson, a former Reuters correspondent, quotes Raymond Baker of anti-graft group Global Financial Integrity as saying: “For every dollar (in aid) that we have been generously handing out across the top of the table, we in the West have been taking back some $10 of illicit money under the table.”
Shaxson notes: “Remember that, next time some bright economist wonders why aid to Africa is not working.”
Of course, Africa is also increasingly on the radar screen of investors who once shunned the continent, from big fund managers to Chinese banks. Money is flowing in that did not come in previously.
http://blogs.reuters.com/africanews/2011/04/08/do-tax-havens-contribute-to-african-poverty/