Suite or Slum? Ghana's Serious Shortage of Affordable Housing

Due to a lack of mid-price housing, urban Ghanaians are often confined to two options: plush penthouse or crammed shanty town.

When filmmaker Leslie Amponsah was shown round a squalid and waterlogged property up for rent in a suburb of Accra, Ghana, he was quoted a monthly rate that was barely affordable, even on a decent income, and was told that the landlord wanted two years up front. The estate agent would also be charging a 10% commission, he was reminded, and was already being paid a fee for every viewing.

As frustrating as this experience was, it is nothing out of the ordinary in Accra. Amponsah endured fruitless searches for months before finding a new home, and tales of middle-class Ghanaians looking aimlessly for suitable properties in Accra are common. "Even when you have the money to rent, it's terrible,” says Amponsah, "that is how ridiculous it is.”

Accra is in the grip of a serious housing crisis. Ghana’s economy has been one of the fastest-growing in the world in recent years, but growth has completely outstripped investment in infrastructure. Despite rising incomes, the housing market has been neglected and this has led to a yawning gap in middle-income properties. On the one hand, 90% of Ghana’s urban housing is informal, much of it in slums on the outskirts of cities; on the other hand, plush gated communities and mansion complexes have sprung up to cater for the new super-wealthy.

Many middle-income Ghanaians, faced with a choice between exorbitantly-priced real estate and slum conditions, have thus been forced further and further out to the edges of cities where house prices and landlords may be more reasonable. The resulting commute, however, can stretch to three hours, and many leave their homes well before dawn to beat the heavy traffic.

Profit-seeking rent-seeking

Around half of Ghana’s 25 million residents now live in urban areas, and suburban sprawl has subsumed towns near major cities. To deal with these growing urban populations, UN Habitat estimates that 5.7 million new rooms – or 2 million new households – will be required by 2020; “If these are to be successfully supplied, 3.8 new rooms must be completed in every minute of the working day for ten years,” the report calculates dramatically.

However, Ghana is nowhere near this target, and the only significant housing developments being built in the heart of Accra are luxury apartments affordable to only a tiny minority of the capital’s 2.3 million population.

"This is without question the biggest problem that Accra faces," says Nat Amarteifio, who was mayor of Accra from 1994 to 1998. He blames much of the housing problems he and his successors have faced to IMF-backed structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s, which were designed to take the economy out of state control, limiting public spending and investment. These policies inhibited the government’s ability to meet Ghana’s housing needs and instead left the property market in the hands of private companies.

"The market is naturally interested in returns on investment,” says Amarteifio, “and private firms are much more assured of that when dealing with upper income buyers than in building housing for the masses.”

Indeed, private developers have tended to focus heavily on building homes to sell to wealthy Ghanaians who can afford $500,000 apartments, and investors who want to be able to charge $3,000 a month in rent.

A tale of two Accras

The result of this is that Accra tells a tale of two cities. In East Legon, flash mansions owned by footballers, retired politicians and senior civil servants sit alongside informal neighbourhoods in which residents have to put up their own streetlights and dig their own sewage systems. In suburbs like Haatso, homes protected by high walls and electrified razor-wire share space with crammed ad hoc slums.

As you move further out, the tarmac roads start to thin out, replaced by deeply-rutted dirt tracks. Soon the only signs of infrastructure are the towering electricity pylons surrounded by the ruins of the half-built houses that were there first.

Keep going, however, and the number of building sites grows as you drive through neighbourhoods named after the small towns they subsumed – Ashongman, Abokobi, Pantang – until there horizon is dotted with thousands of half-built houses perched on the foothills that mark the border between Greater Accra and the mountains of the Eastern Region.

Those half-built houses – on the outskirts of the region, let alone the city – are the single biggest investment most Ghanaians are likely to ever make. And most are built gradually, some over the course of as much as a decade, because land and construction materials – 80% of which have to be imported – are prohibitively expensive.

According to developers, this is one of the main reasons building affordable housing in Ghana is so difficult. According to Alex Tweneboa, former president of the Ghana Real Estate Developers’ Association, even modest homes can cost around $300 per square-foot to build, taking into account the money spent on building the necessary infrastructure and the costs of construction.

"The biggest factor of all is money," he says. Furthermore with lenders seemingly unwilling to invest much faith in the housing market, he adds: "As a developer, if I'm borrowing in Ghana, I will end up paying close to 40% a year in interest."

Who will build?

The result of all this is that most real estate is out of reach for the vast majority of Ghanaians. Tweneboa, for example, revealed that he had recently sold properties in an Accra suburb to high-ranking employees at banks and insurance companies and claimed that even they could only buy the $30,000 homes because their employers provided cheap mortgages. This suggests the government’s plans to build around 9,000 homes at $25,000 will also price out all but the wealthiest groups of Ghanaians. And according to Tweneboa’s research, a more realistic cost for a home for Ghanaians on middle incomes would be closer to $5,000, and that is with large subsidies and a generous mortgage.

But who will build these homes? The government has largely deferred to the private sector, but as Amarteifio insists, “There's simply no way in which the private sector can meet the demand." According to Tweneboa, there is also little profit-making incentive for private firms to want to build affordable housing.

However, the stakes for Ghana and its urban residents are high, and until a solution is found, shanty towns will continue to pop up in even the fanciest of neighbourhoods, slumlords will carry on making a killing renting wooden shacks and repurposed shipping containers to the limitless stream of people looking for a place to live, and the intense competition for the few decent and affordable properties that do exist in the city will mean rents will keep on rising and rising.

This Article was originally published on Think Africa Press and was written by Yepoka Yeebo- a reporter and photographer currently based in London. See and read more of her work on her website. http://www.yepokayeebo.com/

Read more »

Hamas's Human Shield Strategy

The current Gaza conflict is likely to be remembered as a terrible tragedy. Not Because the IDF has unintentionally killed Palestinian civilians but because Hamas has made the use of human shields a despicable primary military strategy. encouraged by the unforgivable silence of leading international NGOs, Hamas deploys two complementary tactics that mock and debase the humanitarian core of international law: firing hundreds of rocket targeting Israeli population centers (including Jews, Muslims and Christians) and the massive use of Palestinian civilians—including women and children—as human shields.

While Israel makes an effort to fight with accurate surgical air strikes directed against Hamas militant and it's terrorist sites, Hamas is doing the opposite and firing rockets indiscriminately towards Israeli population centers in order to kill as many Israelis as possible.

While Israel using their anti-missile "iron dome" shield to protect their civilians, Hamas does just the opposite and Instead of keeping its citizens out of harm’s way they are using and exploit  the Palestinian civilian population as human shields for its militant and infrastructure.

In the past, it meant putting missile launchers near and inside of schools, hospitals, and mosques as well among civilian homes in the densely populated strip, But as Israel has stepped up its efforts to try and avoid civilian casualties, even as it seeks to silence the terrorist fire, Hamas has also increased its efforts to ensure that as many inhabitants of Gaza as possible are hurt in the fighting.

Why Hamas using they're own civilians as human shield?

Hamas sees the use of human shields as a win-win strategy, since if it deters an Israeli response, its fighters and weapons will be safe, and if Israel does respond, the civilian casualties will be another photo opportunity that can be internationally exploited for propaganda purposes and building popular support playing on anger against Israel.

When Hamas terrorist's fires rockets at Israeli cities they usually do this from densely populated areas using timers or remotely controlled launchers, leaving the terrorists themselves at a safe distance. To protect the launch sites from preemptive strikes by the Israeli Air Force, Hamas sends children to play near the launchers or sets them up near schools, playgrounds, hospitals or mosques.

When the IDF is preparing to attack a civilian area (seemingly civilian structures but used in practice as an armory, Hamas headquarters or a firing position) it takes extensive measures in order to avoid civilian casualties such as using telephone calls and leaflets to warn civillians before striking an area. In some cases, the Israelis fire missile without explosive warhead onto the roof of a building to get Palestinians who gathered there to leave before it strikes the building.

These messages urge civilians to leave the area, and even might spare the lives of terrorists. And what Hamas is doing? – Hamas urges civilians to defend the site with their lives, they're telling them to stay there. Is a government that send citizens to protect with their lives a military site a legitimate government?

Hamas don’t even try to hide the fact that they use civilians as human shield, in fact they're admit it loud and clear: Hamas Interior Ministry said in an on-air TV announcement to Gaza residents this week that Israeli’s warning messages "are designed to weaken our resolve and to sow panic and fear among us, in light of the failures of our enemies. We call on all Gaza residents not to pay attention to these messages and not to leave their homes."

Another example of this was noted, when Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV in Gaza aired the group’s spokesperson, Sami Abu Zuhri, urging the population of the Gaza strip to refuse to heed warnings and to use their bodies to shield Hamas facilities:

"The policy of people confronting the Israeli warplanes with their bare chests in order to protect their homes has proven effective against occupation.  Also, this policy reflects the character of our brave, courageous people. We in Hamas call upon our people to adopt this policy, in order to protect the Palestinian homes."

About The Critics

In the lethal "fog of war," even the most-disciplined, best-intentioned armies errantly kill civilians caught in the crossfire as well as their own soldiers who die from friendly fire (a difficult concept to digest). Does anybody remember the thousands of French civilians killed by the Allies during World War II's Normandy Invasion?

In their current asymmetrical war with Hamas, the Israeli Defense Forces are using cellphone messages, leaflets, and other measures in the attempt to decouple civilians from military targets placed in their midst by the terrorist organization. As former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp said of Israel’s previous operations in Gaza: “the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

As well as The flow of hundreds of trucks loaded with foodstuffs and medicine into Gaza from Israel is a daily routine in order to allow further humanitarian supplies to reach noncombatants.

This Israeli effort is obligatory morally and ethically, but in terms of the reality of today's warfare it is an outstanding effort. No other army had ever acted in the same way towards the enemy's civilians.

Despite the obvious logic, Israel gets nothing but a global diplomatic and media chorus of boos from those who promote human rights but willfully blind to the ultimate outrage against humanitarian international law occurring today in Gaza by the hands of Hamas.

 The Bottom Line

Shields protect honorable combatants in the midst of battle; Iron dome is the modern city wall aims to protect civilians; Human shields? It is the weapon of the most cowardly tyrants who violate every principle of humanitarian international law.

few in the mainstream media find it necessary to critical and report on Hamas crimes – let's say plain and simple: Hamas violates the international law  contrary to all ethical and moral standards of warfare – they claim they are protecting they're civilians but they are their greatest enemy.

Read more »

A Girl’s Escape

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — She was a 13-year-old girl who said she was beaten daily by strangers who forced her to work unpaid in their home, and she wanted to escape.

Marilaine was one of 200,000 or more Haitian children called restaveks, typically serving as unpaid maids in strangers’ homes, working for room and board. It is a vast system of child trafficking that is often characterized as a modern form of slavery. I followed Marilaine for a week in Haiti as she tried to flee, find her parents and start life over — and this is her story.

Marilaine grew up in a remote village where no family planning or public schooling is available, one of 12 children to impoverished parents who later separated. As Marilaine tells the story, one day when she was 10 years old, she walked to her father’s house to ask him to help pay her school fees. Instead, he dispatched her here to the capital to work as a restavek, a Creole term used to describe child laborers, without even telling her mother.

“My father didn’t want to spend money on my school fees,” Marilaine explained.

As is common for restaveks, Marilaine slept on the floor and woke up at 5 each morning to clean the house, fetch water and wash dishes. She says she was beaten daily with electrical cords.

Marilaine was allowed no contact with her family. Once, she says, she tried to run away but was caught and beaten. At school, she often cried, and she had scars on her arms and legs from beatings.

Yet the restavek system isn’t always slavery. Sometimes the child gets more food and education than would have been the case in her own family (two-thirds of restaveks are girls). Marilaine says that she was fed properly and that she was also allowed to attend a free afternoon school.

Many Haitian restaveks are treated much worse. One 12-year-old restavek I interviewed said that she rises at 4 each morning to get everything ready for “the princesses,” as she calls the teenage girls in the house. Everyone in the house beats her, she says, and they refuse to let her see her mother for fear that she might run away.

An aid group called the Restavek Freedom Foundation helped Marilaine escape her home and find refuge in a safe house for restaveks. The mood was festive in the beautiful home as the dozen girls living there cheered Marilaine’s arrival and hugged her.

Marilaine picked up a book, telling me that she wasn’t allowed to touch books at her old house. She tried on new clothes. She slept in a bed.

But the family that Marilaine had been working for was furious. I visited the woman of the house, and she insisted that she had never beaten the girl and that Marilaine had in effect been kidnapped from her.

The leader of the neighborhood association, Junior Pataud, offered a conflicting defense. “In Haitian culture, it’s normal to beat a child,” he said. “But that’s not the same as mistreatment.”

The next day, the neighbors gathered angrily outside the school Marilaine had attended, blaming it for the girl’s escape and threatening to set fire to it unless Marilaine was returned. After hours of tense negotiations, the police averted a riot.

A few days later, I drove for several hours with the police and the Restavek Freedom Foundation to Marilaine’s village. When Marilaine stepped out of the car, family members and neighbors were stunned. They had assumed that she had died years ago.

Yet the reunion was a letdown. Marilaine’s mom didn’t seem at all thrilled to see her daughter again, and Marilaine quickly made it clear that she wanted to return to the safe house in the capital so that she could attend a good school. The police told Marilaine that she would have to stay in the village with her family, and she burst into tears.

The authorities will probably eventually let Marilaine return to the Restavek Freedom Foundation safe house, but the episode was a reminder that helping people is a complex, uphill task — and that the underlying problem behind human trafficking is poverty.

One way to fight such human trafficking would be to provide free and accessible birth control, so that women like Marilaine’s mother don’t end up with 12 children that they struggle to feed.

Another would be to provide free public education, so that parents don’t feel that the only way to get schooling for their children is to send them off as restaveks.

That’s why what’s at stake in fighting global poverty isn’t just poor people’s incomes. It’s also dignity and freedom — and the right of a girl to grow up in something better than quasi slavery.

My New Year’s wish: May Marilaine in 2014 finally find freedom and an education

This Article was published originally in Nytimes and was written by  Nicholas Kristof

Read more »

Never again? : Crimes Against Humanity In North Korea

North Korea's leadership is committing systematic and appalling human rights abuses against its own citizens on a scale unparalleled in the modern world, crimes against humanity with strong resemblances to those committed by the Nazis, a United Nations inquiry has concluded.

The UN's commission on human rights in North Korea, which gathered evidence for almost a year, including often harrowing testimony at public hearings worldwide, said there was compelling evidence of torture, execution and arbitrary imprisonment, deliberate starvation and an almost complete lack of free thought and belief.

The chair of the three-strong panel set up by the UN commissioner on human rights has personally written to North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, to warn that he could face trial at the international criminal court (ICC) for his personal culpability as head of state and leader of the military.

"The commission wishes to draw your attention that it will therefore recommend that the United Nations refer the situation in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [the formal name for North Korea] to the international criminal court to render accountable all those, including possibly yourself, who may be responsible for the crimes against humanity," Michael Kirby, an Australian retired judge, wrote to Kim.

At a press conference to launch the report, Kirby said there were "many parallels" between the evidence he had heard and crimes committed by the Nazis and their allies in the second world war. He noted the evidence of one prison camp inmate who said his duties involved burning the bodies of those who had starved to death and using the remains as fertiliser.

"When you see that image in your mind of bodies being burned it does bring back memories of the end of world war two, and the horror and the shame and the shock," Kirby said. "I never thought that in my lifetime it would be part of my duty to bring revelations of a similar kind."

Holding up a copy of the report, Kirby said other nations could not say of North Korea, as happened with the Nazis, that they did not know the extent of the crimes: "Now the international community does know. There will be no excusing a failure of action because we didn't know. It's too long now. The suffering and the tears of the people of North Korea demand action."

Asked how many North Korean leaders and officials could ultimately be held responsible, Kirby said it could reach the hundreds.

The inquiry heard public evidence in Seoul, Tokyo, London and Washington. Among more than 80 witnesses, along with 240 people who gave confidential interviews to avoid reprisals against relatives in North Korea, were escapers from the country's feared prison camps, including one who reported seeing a female prisoner forced to drown her newborn baby because it was presumed to have a Chinese father.

The near-400-page main report concludes there is overwhelming evidence that crimes against humanity have been, and are still being, committed within the hermetic nation.

It says: "These are not mere excesses of the state: they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded. The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world."

North Korea refused to participate in the investigation or allow the commission to visit, and immediately rejected the findings, calling them "a product of politicisation of human rights on the part of EU and Japan in alliance with the US hostile policy".

The report recommends that the UN refer the situation in North Korea to the ICC. While North Korea is not a signatory to the treaty that created the ICC, the UN security council can extend the court's remit in exceptional cases.

In practice this would probably be vetoed by China, which has close links with North Korea and maintains a policy of sending back people found to have fled across the border, despite widespread evidence that they face mistreatment and detention on their return. The commission's report heavily criticises China for this, saying the policy appears to breach international laws on refugees.

The report concludes that many of the crimes against humanity stem directly from state policies in a country which, since it was formed from the division of Korea, has been run on a highly individual variant of Stalinist-based self-reliance and centralised dynastic rule. The inquiry found "an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion", with citizens brought into an all-encompassing system of indoctrination from childhood.

Perhaps the most chilling section describes the vast network of secret prison camps, known as kwanliso, where hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are believed to have died through starvation, execution or other means. It is estimated that between 80,000 and 120,000 political prisoners are still held, in many cases secretly

The report says: "Their families are not informed of their fate or whereabouts. Persons accused of political crimes therefore become victims of enforced disappearance. Making the suspect disappear is a deliberate feature of the system that serves to instil fear in the population."

Other particularly disturbing parts of the report detail the experiences of women who are interned on their forced return from China when it is believed they could be pregnant from a Chinese man, something which contravenes North Korea notions of racial purity. Aside from the drowning of the newborn baby the panel heard testimony of forced abortions, sometimes using chemicals or beatings, or surgical procedures without anaesthetic.

Other sections of the report cover abuses such as the lack of food. While natural disasters were in part to blame for a famine that killed huge numbers in the 1990s, the report notes that the North Korean state has "used food as a means of control over the population". It adds: "It has prioritised those whom the authorities believe to be crucial in maintaining the regime over those deemed expendable."

The commission also condemns the almost complete lack of freedom of movement for North Koreans both within their country and abroad, the discrimination of the so-called songbun system, where the state politically classifies people based on their birth and family, and the large-scale abduction of people from other countries, mainly Japan and South Korea.

The report says the abuses clearly meet the threshold needed for proof of crimes against humanity in international law. t adds: "The perpetrators enjoy impunity. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is unwilling to implement its international obligation to prosecute and bring the perpetrators to justice, because those perpetrators act in accordance with state policy."

Asked whether he believed the report would change anything immediately in North Korea, Kirby recalled a UN mission he led in the early 1990s to report on human rights abuses in Cambodia, some years before that country's eventual UN-led tribunal on Khmer Rouge crimes. He said: "Bearing witness, collecting the stories, recording them and putting them there for future use can sometimes bear fruit a little later."

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON "THE GUARDIAN"  AND WAS WRITTEN BY Peter Walker

Read more »