You must watch this video to better understand "African Land and Natural Resource Grabs Destroy Lives and Futures of Africans"
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This is impact of the land grab investment on the people even while the government denies it all. This is why I call it not only a land grab, but a life and future grab from these innocent people. There are too many other examples to tell; not only in Gambella, Ethiopia or Africa but throughout the world.
The solution to this burgeoning problems of land and natural resource grabs is to have a government where the law can protect the people and where the law is not only limited to the elite, its cronies and partners. For positive change to come, citizens must be able to claim their rights—human, civil, land and religious.
Until there is such a government to protect the rights of the people, which upholds democratic principles of free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of assembly, freedom in the media, an independent judiciary and institutions, an independent appeal process, a non-politicalized military and similar aspects of free and open societies, the people will be seen as impediments to whatever the government wants for its own interests.
No one is safe in such a political climate. This is where donor countries like the US can become involved in pressuring these governments to be accountable to the people; not supporting autocratic regimes that are creating poverty by pushing people off their land.
Africans who used to feed themselves from farming their own land are now hungry and needing food aid. Some who have been hired to work on these agricultural farms, are often working for wages below the World Bank’s minimum wage standards.
BY OBANG METHO
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