Pastoralist communities are effectively losing their rights to their communal lands through an obscure and predatory engagement process that involves conservation NGOs and self-seeking community leaders.
The civil war in Ethiopia is a fight over control and access to the country's national cake that was previously enjoyed solely by the TPLF regime, and which they are now determined to recapture at all costs.
Failed government leadership, the lack of accountable partnerships between aid partners and the government, rampant corruption, and psychological dependence on aid have kept Somalis on life support.
Fifteen years later, and a billion dollars in funding, AGRA’s promise to double productivity and incomes for 30 million smallholder farming households by 2020 while reducing food insecurity by 50 per cent has not been fulfilled.
What is at stake is one of the most unique contributions to global jurisprudence in recent times: a basic structure doctrine that is not substantive but procedural, that does not impose a judicial veto but seeks a deeper form of public participation to amend the Constitution, and which provides to direct deliberative democracy an integral role in processes of significant constitutional change.
By now, it is evident that the battle lines have been drawn, and the points of conflict are beginning to appear in a clearer fashion.
Both Courts were fairly clear that even the basic structure of the Constitution is amendable, but that conceptually, the procedure for amending it and for altering constitutional identity itself – the exercise of primary constituent power – has to be found outside the Constitution, and not within it.
The fortress conservation model, created with support from some of the world’s biggest environmental groups and western donors, has led to land dispossession, militarization, and widespread human rights abuses.
Before Nashulai, Maasai communities around the Mara triangle were selling off their rights to live and work on their land, becoming “conservation refugees”.
In the context of the climate emergency and the need for renewable energy sources, competition over the supply of cobalt is growing. This competition is most intense in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nick Bernards argues that the scramble for cobalt is a capitalist scramble, and that there can be no ‘just’ transition without overthrowing capitalism on a global scale.
The country has faced a myriad challenges in combating the pandemic and has not attained its target of fully inoculating 10 million people by the end of December 2021.
A new and different state is necessary to manage the complex problems in the region, but is it possible under the current regime that has fed the conflict?
