Leao survives the Brazilian floods alone

'Neath her hind feet as rushing on his prey, The lordly Lion greets the God of day.'
- Aratos

This dog is Leao. His custodian Cristina Maria Cesario Santana died in the landslides in Brazil that killed hundreds a week ago. Leao has been beside her grave for two days waiting for his owner to return. Santana and Leao lived in Teresopolis near Rio de Janeiro where the latest human death toll from the landslides is 785 with two in five from Teresopolis.

Founded by the Swiss burghers of Friburg in 1819, the nearby city of Nova Friburgo fared even worse with 365 deaths. Both cities are in the Região Serrana of Rio de Janeiro state in south eastern Brazil some 60km north of Rio itself. Região Serrana means mountain district and many dwellings in the region are exposed to landslide hazards due to the steep terrain. On 11 January it started to rain in the region, heavily. In Teresopolis it rained 144mm in 24 hours, more than the average for the month of January.

The downpours caused rivers to break their banks and triggered landslides. It knocked over bridges, houses, churches and the entire downtown area of Novo Friburgo. 6,000 people were made homeless and another 8,000 had to leave their houses and go to shelters while authorities assessed the risk of more mudslides. The death toll rose to make it Brazil’s worst ever natural disaster. Further rainfall over the weekend slowed rescue efforts. Army troops, police forces and thousands of volunteers searched for survivors and recovered bodies while air force helicopters transported food and water to families stranded in rural areas without communications.

The San Antonio river burst its banks, submerging buildings, while the rainfall set off several mudslides sending entire shantytowns washing through the city streets below. Brazil’s saturated urban centres are littered with poor-quality homes built informally on precarious inclines. As the Christian Science Monitor said the correlation between Rio’s favelas and its jagged hills is so strong that morro (hill) is a common synonym for “slum,” and asfalto (asphalt) stands for the higher-quality neighbourhoods below. Teresopolis Mayor Jorge Mario Sedlacek called it a huge catastrophe. It was, but it was a human-made one.

According to watchdog group Contas Abertas, the federal government budgeted $263m for disaster prevention last year but only spent $82m. And only 1 percent of that went to Rio state while a whopping 54 percent went to Bahia, a state that had no major disasters because the minister in charge of disbursing funds was running for governor there. It is part of a long tradition of political corruption in Brazil.

While little is spoken about corruption, even less is known about Cristina Maria Cesario Santana, a citizen of Teresopolis. She was one of the town’s 138,000 inhabitants and she was one of 316 people who died there. Television images from the town showed cars submerged by water, buses and trucks with water up to their windows, homes destroyed and tearful survivors surveying the carnage. One resident described the scene as being "like a horror film" and said she saw a baby "carried away by a torrent like a doll" as the child's mother tried in vain to save it. Christina presumably was also carried away in the torrent. Her tan crossbreed dog Leao somehow survived. And his picture mourning Cristina has reverberated across the media world.

The promises of new Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff have reverberated less but are more important in the long run. Rousseff pledged a swift relief effort but will have to confront major flaws in emergency planning and disaster prevention. She said the disaster was caused by decades of lax oversight by municipal authorities who allowed poor people to build houses on hillsides vulnerable to landslides. “Building houses on high risk areas is the rule in Brazil, not the exception,” said added. “You have to get people away and into secure areas. The two fundamental issues are housing and land use and that involves putting proper drainage and sewage systems in place.” But many people living in flood-prone areas say they have nowhere else to go. Like Leao, the problem of the favelas is not going to go away any time soon.

British banks complicit in Nigerian corruption

A new report from a British non-government corporate watchdog has exposed how British banks have accepted millions of dollars in bribes from corrupt Nigerian politicians. The report called “International Thief Thief: How British Banks are complicit in Nigerian corruption”(PDF) has exposed rotten practices in the banking industry. Global Witness named five major banks Barclays, NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Switzerland's UBS in the 40-page report it said have failed to adequately investigate the source of tens of millions of dollars taken from two Nigerian governors accused of corruption.

Robert Palmer, a campaigner at Global Witness said banks were are quick to penalise ordinary customers for minor infractions but seem to be less concerned about dirty money passing through their accounts. "Large scale corruption is simply not possible without a bank willing to process payments from dodgy sources, or hold accounts for corrupt politicians,” he said.

Global Witness admitted the five banks might not have broken the law but said British banking regulator the Financial Services Authority must do more to close loopholes to prevent money laundering through British banks. "The FSA needs to do much more to prevent banks from facilitating corruption,” the report said. “As yet, no British bank has been publicly fined or even named by the regulators for taking corrupt funds, whether willingly or through negligence... in stark contrast to the United States, where banks have been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for handling dirty money." While HSBC claimed it had "rigorous and robust" measures in place to stop such abuses, a spokesman refused to talk about individual customers hiding behind the bank's confidentiality policies.

Global Witness’s findings were based on court documents from successful cases the Nigerian government brought in London against two former state governors Diepreye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa state and Joshua Dariye of Plateau state. Alamieyeseigha was jailed in Nigeria after pleading guilty to embezzlement and money laundering charges after being caught with $1.6m in cash at his London home. Dariye was arrested in 2004 in London after buying properties worth millions of dollars though he was on $63,500 a year salary.

Global Witness found that Barclays, HSBC, RBS, NatWest and UBS held accounts for both men. They said they “funnelled dirty money into the UK, spending their ill-gotten gains on sustaining a luxury lifestyle, in stark contrast to the poverty of ordinary Nigerians.” Global Witness said banks which were propped up by taxpayer’s money were getting away with practices that undermine aid programs. “This is not just illogical, it is immoral,” they said. “Our financial system is morally complicit in Nigerian corruption.” The banks have form: nearly all of them had previously fallen foul of the FSA in 2001 by reportedly helping the former Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha funnel nearly a billion pounds through the UK.

Nigeria ranks 130 out of 180 nations in Transparency International's list of countries perceived as most transparent in 2009. It has a population of 150 million people many of whom survive on $2 a day yet the country is one of the world's top champagne importers and its wealthiest residents are among the continent's richest. Al Jazeera quoted Nuhu Ribadu, the former head of Nigeria's anti-corruption agency who estimated that corruption and mismanagement swallows up about 40 per cent of the country's annual oil income. "Without access to the international financial system, it would be much harder for corrupt politicians from the developing world to loot their treasuries or accept bribes," Global Witness said in its report.

African basket case: Just another day of crisis in Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau parliamentary speaker Raimundo Pereira was sworn in yesterday as interim head of state barely 24 hours after President Joao Bernardo Vieira (pictured) was assassinated. The tiny West African republic is still reeling from the news that the country’s military killed the president in apparent revenge for the murder of the armed forces chief of staff the day before. Despite the deaths, the army denies there is a coup and the capital Bissau remains quiet. Parliament has declared seven days of national mourning for the assassination of the president and two State funerals. According to the country’s precarious constitution, Pereira now has 60 days to call an election.

It is likely the deaths are related to tribal and drug trafficking issues. The chain of extraordinary events began on 1 March. The assassinated president Vieira (from the minority Papel ethnic group) has long had a tense relationship with the army dominated by officers from the majority Balanta ethnic group including chief of staff, Batista Tagme Na Wai. So it was no surprise Vieira was accused when Na Wai was killed in an explosion that destroyed part of the military headquarters on Sunday evening. While no one claimed responsibility for the blast, many armed forces members placed the blame squarely on the president. Renegade troops left Mansoa barracks, 60km north of Bissau, late on Sunday, to with a mission to "liquidate President Vieira". They first released seven soldiers who carried out a failed attack on the 69 year old Vieira last year. They then attacked Vieira as he tried to flee his presidential home for the safety of the Angolan embassy. He was savagely beaten before being shot several times in the throat and face.

The United Nations Security Council issued its usual platitude of condemnation about the assassinations. The council called on the country’s government to bring the killer to justice and pleaded for calm and restraint on the streets. It urged all parties to resolve their disputes through political and peaceful means within the framework of its democratic institutions and opposed any attempt to change the Government through unconstitutional means. However, despite these pious calls, the UN has not offered any practical help to the struggling nation.

Chronically poor Guinea-Bissau has been the victim of political instability and corruption ever since it won unilateral independence from colonial masters Portugal in 1974. It was ruled by a junta for ten years and the first multi-party elections did not occur until 1994. But the military has intervened several times since then, most notably in a civil war which ripped the country apart in 1998-1999. That war saw the overthrow of Joao Vieira's first term of office but he was returned to power in 2005. His regime was destabilised by parliamentary elections in November 2008 which was won by opposition parties. Vieira survived a coup attempt that same month when renegade soldiers launched a pre-dawn attack on his residence.

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Scott Baldauf says this week’s double assassinations are a troubling sign for a region “with weak institutions for self-government and strong incentives for corruption”. The country of 1.5 million population is one of the poorest in the world, ranked the 175th out of 177 nations in the U.N. Development Program's Human Development Index. Apart from cashew nuts, its main industry is drugs. Guinea-Bissau is a transit point for the cocaine trade between South America and Europe. With no navy to speak of, Colombian drug cartels are free to land on islands off the coast before distributing their cargo to impoverished African migrants who ferry the drugs north to Europe. “Government corruption, fed by poor government salaries at the bottom and uncertain political leadership at the top, means that Guinea Bissau has few tools to stop the drug trafficking,” says Baldauf.

According to the UK Independent, an estimated tonne of pure Colombian cocaine is transited through Guinea-Bissau’s islands every day. It claimed that politicians and armed forces officers are key facilitators of the trade. The denial by navy head, Jose Americo Bubu Na Tchutu wasn’t particularly convincing. “I just sit there waiting for evidence," he said. But the drug traffickers aren’t sitting there waiting. David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies is convinced they are involved in the deaths of Vieira and Na Wai. "This recent set of killings can be explained [as] the action of the drug traffickers, who would not allow anything to get in the way or to obstruct their links with Europe,” he said.

Mixed results in World Bank corruption report

A new World Bank report has praised African nations for their fight against corruption. The report measured the quality of governance in 212 countries from 1996 to 2006 and found Africa had shown the greatest improvement. The report did, however, find that the gains and losses balanced out such that the average quality of governance worldwide over the past decade has not improved much. Finland, Iceland, Denmark Norway and New Zealand were judged the least corrupt countries in the world while Somalia, Myanmar (Burma), Equatorial Guinea, Haiti and Zimbabwe ranked most corrupt.

The World Bank’s Daniel Kaufmann, co-author of the report and director of the banks knowledge-sharing and training arm, said that bribery is costing world $1 trillion a year with the billion people living in extreme poverty worst affected. “The burden of corruption falls disproportionately on the bottom billion people living in extreme poverty,” he said. Kaufman said improvements in governance are critical for aid effectiveness and for sustained long-run growth.

The report entitled Governance Matters, 2007: Worldwide Governance Indicators 1996-2006 highlighted the number of African countries that had made great strides in improving various aspects of government. Using criteria such as accountability, free media, political stability,government effectiveness, regulatory quality, the rule of law and control of corruption, the report covered 212 countries and territories and drew on 33 different data sources. It captured the views of tens of thousands of survey respondents worldwide, as well as thousands of experts in the private, NGO and public sectors.

Some countries such as Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Ivory Coast and Belarus had regressed in the timeframe of the survey. But others are doing well: Kenya, Niger, Sierra Leone, on leadership accountability, Algeria and Liberia on the rule of law, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Rwanda and Sierra Leone on political stability and Tanzania on corruption. Outside Africa, those making significant gains included Indonesia, Ukraine, Columbia, Turkey and Afghanistan. Meanwhile corruption is on the rise in Bangladesh, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Pakistan.

Management of corruption is now a key World Bank benchmark. Many of the debts of the world's poorest countries have been written off under the Bank's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative and increased aid flows to them on condition that they stamp out corruption. HIPC started in 1996 and was enhanced in 1999 as an outcome of a comprehensive review by the International Development Association (IDA) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). HIPC’s debt-burden thresholds were adjusted downward, which enabled more countries to qualify for larger volumes of debt relief.

The report showed that corruption in the US has significantly worsened in the last decade. The World Bank scored the US on the same measure as Chile. Similar surprises showed emerging economies such as Botswana, Costa Rica and Lithuania, scored higher on the rule of law and corruption than two industrialized countries Italy and Greece. Daniel Kaufman the report showed the power of data “It begins to challenge these long-held popular notions that the rich world has reached nirvana in governance,” he said.

However Kaufman also admitted that the Bank’s own recent scandal involving former President Paul Wolfowitz has impacted the credibility of both the report and the bank itself. Wolfowitz was forced to resign in May after he violated a World Bank ethics rule forbidding personal relationships between bank employees and their supervisors. Kaufmann said countries rightly asked the Bank, "What right do you have of rating the world when you first have to rate yourselves? It has to start at home."