Hacking Apartheid - Cryptography Tools for Activists
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/hacking-apartheid-cryptography-tools-for-activists
During the apartheid era in South Africa, the ban imposed on the African National Congress (ANC) party meant that anti-apartheid activists were under constant surveillance, and were frequently...
Chinese migrants have changed the face of South Africa. Now they’re leaving. — Quartz
▻https://qz.com/940619/chinese-traders-changed-south-africa-now-theyre-leaving
▻https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/a-sign-at-the-entrance-of-china-city-johannesburg-e149312195
“What’s the point of working in South Africa where it is more dangerous and lonely when you could be making the same wage in China?” says Mingwei Huang, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, echoing sentiments expressed by traders during her research at the China malls.
An estimated half a million to more than 1 million Chinese live in Africa, many of them small-scale traders and entrepreneurs. Chinese traders in African countries from Botswana to Senegal are also struggling to make a profit in the once booming trade of importing cheap goods from China—a sign that the best days of an industry involving thousands of African and Chinese traders, agents, and middlemen across Africa and China might be over.
Invasion of fall armyworms ravages maize crops in 20 African countries
▻https://www.ft.com/content/93222f52-2b46-11e7-9ec8-168383da43b7 #Africa #Afrique #agriculture
No known predator, chemicals ineffective, food shortages expected, will spread to Europe.
Armyworm invasion threatening southern Africa’s crops
▻https://www.yahoo.com/news/armyworm-invasion-threatening-southern-africas-crops-170842090.html
HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) — An invasion of armyworms is stripping southern Africa of key food crops and could spread to other parts of the continent, experts warned Tuesday at an emergency meeting of 16 African nations.
South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia are among the countries where the fall armyworm has invaded fields of maize, a staple crop throughout the region.
The fall armyworm is a new threat in southern Africa. It is mostly associated with the Americas, where it has been since 1957, said David Phiri, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization coordinator for the region.
The pest is devastating to crops and so far impossible to eradicate.
Armyworm invasion destroys crops in southern Africa - CNN.com
▻http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/24/africa/armyworm-invasion-africa/index.html
Hard to kill
The fall armyworms moths are born survivors, according to Georg Goergen, an entomologist at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture who is a long-time researcher of the species.
“This species is the number one pest of the Americas,” he says. “We saw it last year in Nigeria and Togo and it has spread much faster than expected.”
In North America the species migrates over huge distances, from Florida in the South to Canada in the North, and Goergen expects them to spread further in Africa.
“The next step will be countries such as Kenya and Tanzania... I don’t know if it can cross the Sahara.”
The entomologist is involved with research efforts to find an effective pesticide to control the caterpillars. He says the existing chemicals being used in Africa are unlikely to succeed.
In the US, genetically modified crops have been used to combat them, although they have developed defences.
As the armyworm crisis deepens, the search for a solution is at risk of becoming desperate.
South Africa lifts ban on domestic rhino horn sales | Environment | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/06/south-africa-lifts-ban-on-domestic-rhino-horn-sales
South Africa’s highest court has rejected a bid by the government to keep a ban on domestic trade in rhino horn, a court document shows.
The ruling by the constitutional court effectively means rhino horns may be traded locally.
The department of environmental affairs had sought to retain a moratorium on domestic trade in rhino horns which was dismissed by last year by another court. In a one paragraph ruling, the court ruled that the application by government be dismissed.
#rhino #afrique_du_sud cc @fil
Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle opens the door for nuclear deal in South Africa | Hartmut Winkler
▻https://theconversation.com/zumas-cabinet-reshuffle-opens-the-door-for-nuclear-deal-in-south-af
The cabinet reshuffle can therefore be viewed as a desperate bid by the Zuma faction, and associated beneficiaries such as the Gupta family, to drive the pro-nuclear agenda. This is despite the dangerous financial burden it would impose on the country, and the massive resultant debt repayment obligations. Source: The Conversation
Reshuffle Chronicles: ANC Integrity Commission wants Zuma to resign | Daily Maverick
▻https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-04-03-reshuffle-chronicles-anc-integrity-commission-wants-zuma-to-resign/#
A letter signed by ANC Integrity Commission Chair Andrew Mlangeni will be delivered to ANC Secretary-General Gwede Mantashe on Monday calling for an urgent meeting with the party’s top officials. Mlangeni said the Integrity Commission is “deeply perturbed” by President Zuma’s decision to reshuffle Cabinet without consultation. Also, public statements from the SG and Treasurer General, Zweli Mkhize, distancing themselves from Zuma’s conduct were unprecedented in the history of the movement. The IC intends to meet with President Zuma at the historic Liliesleaf farm on April 9 and ask him to step down.
Zuma Said to Survive Calls to Quit Ruling South Africa’s ANC
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-04-05/zuma-said-to-survive-calls-to-quit-in-south-african-ruling-party
Palestinian BNC Mourns Loss of Anti-Apartheid Icon Ahmed Kathrada
March 28, 2017/ By The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC)
▻https://bdsmovement.net/news/palestinian-bnc-mourns-loss-anti-apartheid-icon-ahmed-kathrada
March 28, 2017, Occupied Palestine —The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) has heard with great sadness the news of Comrade Ahmed Kathrada’s passing. Mr. Kathrada, born to an Indian Muslim family, was the most prominent Asian South African in the movement to end apartheid, the system of racial discrimination, segregation and white dominance that existed in South Africa until it was defeated in 1994.
Comrade Kathrada was also an active and consistent supporter of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. He visited Palestine, and saw the apartheid system we endure for himself. He said when in Palestine: “In our short stay here we have seen and heard enough to conclude that Apartheid has been reborn here. In its reborn form it is however worse than its predecessor. Even during the worst days of Apartheid we did not have walls to divide and control people, we also did not have separate roads for separate races, and we did not have the system of checkpoints that exist here.”
TOP ISRAELIS HAVE WARNED OF #APARTHEID, SO WHY THE OUTRAGE AT A UN REPORT ?
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/top-israelis-have-warned-of-apartheid-so-why-the-outrage-at-a-un-repor
IN HIS MEMOIR, the Israeli journalist Hirsh Goodman described how he returned home from the Six Day War in June 1967 to hear the country’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, speak on the radio. “Israel, he said, better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible,” recalled Goodman. “If it did not Israel would soon become an apartheid state.”
Goodman was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa. “That phrase, ‘Israel will become an apartheid state,’ resonated with me,” Goodman wrote. “In a flash I understood what he was saying.”
In a flash. Yet fifty years later, despite an entrenched and ongoing occupation, Israel’s defenders angrily reject any invocation of the A-word. [...]
[...] To mention the grotesque crime of apartheid in the same sentence as the democratic state of Israel, they claim, is “slander”, a “smear”, a “despicable” and “blatant lie”, a shameful act of “Israel-bashing” and a “new form of anti-Semitism.”
So what, I wonder, does that make Ben Gurion? Dishonest or despicable? How about Yitzhak Rabin, who told a TV journalist in 1976 during the first of his two terms as Israel’s prime minister, “I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, if we don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state”? Was he also engaged in a smear campaign against the nation he led?
In recent years, two more former Israeli premiers, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, have echoed their illustrious predecessors’ warnings. Olmert has predicted that “if the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished” while Barak has declared that “if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Are they Israel bashers, too?
The Rumor Bomb: On Convergence Culture and Politics Jayson Harsin / American University of Paris – Flow
▻http://www.flowjournal.org/2008/12/the-rumor-bomb-on-convergence-culture-and-politics-jayson-harsin-americ
In February 2006, the Democratic Party of Japan admitted that one of its politicians used a hoax email producing a scandal that implicated a senior official of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, who allegedly received large sums of money from a publicly disgraced Internet startup. In 2005, a political consultant in South Africa was paid to fabricate emails to sow divisions and contribute to the succession battle in the ANC. In Nigeria in September 2008, an entire TV station was closed after it repeated an internet claim that Nigeria’s president would resign due to illness.
New photo-editing technologies led to visual rumors. Recall the doctored photo of John Kerry with “Hanoi” Jane Fonda which made its way into the New York Times, and countless war journalism examples.
Perhaps the most common American political rumor recently concerned Barack Obama. When it was clear Obama would be a contender, the Muslim rumor was launched, landing on mainstream news when a Clinton campaign volunteer was caught re-emailing it. Videoed McCain supporters also announced dread of an “Arab” President Obama, again frequenting news agendas, pressuring McCain to respond that Obama was a “decent family man” (not an Arab). Meanwhile, these rumors have complements that imply Obama was/is a terrorist because he allegedly “pals around with terrorists,” referring to acquaintance Bill Ayers.
Rumor then is a keyword of contemporary politics and culture. But is it useful as a scholarly concept?
I proposed the concept of “rumor bomb” (RB) to distinguish a particular use of rumor from other related notions.1 I begin with the widespread definition of rumor as a claim whose truthfulness is in doubt and which often has no clear source even if its ideological or partisan origins and intents are clear. I then treat it as a particular rhetorical strategy in current contexts of media and politics in many societies. The “RB” extends the definition of rumor into a media/politics concept with the following features:
1. A crisis of verification: perhaps the most salient and politically dangerous aspect of rumor. [...]
2. A context of public uncertainty or anxiety about a political group, figure, or cause, which the RB overcomes or transfers onto an opponent. ....
3. A clearly partisan even if anonymous source (eg. “an unnamed advisor to the president”), which seeks political profit from the RB’s diffusion. [...]
4. A rapid electronic diffusion: i.e. a “convergence culture” where news travels fast.
Ça fait plaisir d’entendre de nouveau du bon #son chez Paris DJs Soundsystem :)
▻http://www.parisdjs.com/index.php/post/Paris-DJs-Soundsystem-presents-Friends-Family-Vol-2
Following up where we left off with the first volume, here’s the second part of our “extravaganza” mix digging into the vast selection of current artists, bands and producers from the unique “Paris DJs universe”. We’ve left you last week with a 25-tracks selection of American friends, let’s now check out the rest of the world, with 25 more productions and reissues originating this time from Spain, France, Germany, UK, Australia, Ethiopia, Netherlands, Israel, South Africa, Nigeria, Togo, Ghana and Cape Verde !
▻http://traffic.libsyn.com/parisdjs/Paris_DJs_Soundsystem-Friends_and_Family_Vol_2.mp3
Trump’s “global gag rule”: implications for human rights and global health - The Lancet Global Health
▻http://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(17)30084-0/fulltext?
This executive order could have great human rights and ethics implications. South Africa is an example of a country that stands to be adversely affected. The country bears the world’s largest burden of HIV and is a major recipient of US federal funding.10 The country’s constitution enshrines the right to reproductive decision-making and the right to health,11 while its laws on termination of pregnancy places a legal obligation on health-care providers to provide or refer abortion-seekers to relevant facilities, when qualifying criteria are met.12 Compliance with Trump’s order will potentially require clinicians in NGOs and international agencies that operate in South Africa and receive US federal funding to violate their professional codes of ethics,13 the country’s abortion laws, and the country’s bill of rights.
#planning_familial #avortement #santé_reproductive #trump #gag_rule
Good Hope. South Africa and The Netherlands from 1600 - Exhibitions – Now on view - What’s on - Rijksmuseum
▻https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/good-hope
▻http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/EYloQpzaG7nxTZ98fJfQSVv_4xfi69wkR-S3PMDW9EhXr_VSR9vdzVMxLlVa2
#photographie #exposition #PieterHugo #AfriqueDuSud #Pays_Bas
Pretoria: Violence erupts at anti-migrant protest
Police fire tear gas and rubber bullets to break up local protesters who blame foreigners for unemployment and crime.
XENOPHOBE AFRIQUE DU SUD…
Sous la pression de migrations importantes, des milliers de personnes, la grande nation arc-en-ciel sud-africaine est en train de devenir xénophobe. « Les attaques répétées contre les Africains étrangers conduites par des bandes armées de gourdins, de machettes et de fusils, montrent que les héritiers de Nelson Mandela n’ont pas expliqué à leur peuple le rôle décisif d’une Afrique unie contre le racisme dont ils sont sortis », explique le Financialafrik du 22 février. En dix jours d’attaques et d’incendies des échoppes nigérianes et d’autres pays africains, aucun membre de l’ANC (African National Congress), le parti au pouvoir, n’est intervenu. Trop occupées à une guerre de succession, les élites embourgeoisées ne se sont même pas excusées auprès des pays concernés, si bien que le Nigéria s’en est ému et a appelé l’Union Africaine (UA) à admonester Prétoria. Mais comme en Europe, et maintenant aux Etats-Unis, l’Afrique du Sud traîne les pieds dès qu’il s’agit d’intégration et de libre circulation.
▻https://blogs.letemps.ch/christine-von-garnier/2017/02/26/xenophobe-afrique-du-sud
The migrant and the enemy within
Africa is not exempt from the global phenomenon of hostility to the migrant. As early as 1961, Frantz Fanon warned that, although anti-colonial nationalism constituted new nations in resistance, and marshalled extraordinary courage and commitment in struggle, without “a rapid step … from national consciousness to political and social consciousness”, new forms of chauvinism could emerge. “From nationalism we have passed to ultra-nationalism, to chauvinism … These foreigners are called on to leave; their shops are burned, their street stalls are wrecked.”
Across Africa, colonial arrangements that tied rights to territory, within or between national borders, continue to be exploited by elites to sustain oppressive forms of rule. Mahmood Mamdani’s compelling body of work has illuminated the failure of most post-colonial states to break with the colonial attempt to divide people into ethnicities tied to territories.
In South Africa, migrants who arrive from countries like Somalia or Pakistan, and without great wealth or professional accreditation, face systemic discrimination from an extremely corrupt and abusive state. Politicians shamelessly refer to people, irrespective of their legal status with regard to citizenship, as “foreign nationals”, and the conflation between “illegal immigrants” and “criminals” is relentless. Johannesburg mayor #Herman_Mashaba ’s xenophobia is repulsive to the point of being Trumpian in its crudity.
▻https://mg.co.za/article/2018-09-07-00-the-migrant-and-the-enemy-within
Crossing the Lesotho-South Africa border
One individual and a short journey across the #Lesotho border capture South Africa’s awkward economic and social relationship with the Kingdom in the Sky.
Art in dark times
▻http://africasacountry.com/2017/02/art-in-dark-times
The Art of Life in #South_Africa is about an art school, #Ndaleni, in what is now South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. The school, on the property of a former mission station, was established in 1952 and closed in 1981. If you’re looking at a map, Ndaleni is less than 100km from Durban, the biggest city…
#International_Criminal_Court Politricks
▻http://africasacountry.com/2017/02/international-criminal-court-politricks
South Africa’s announcement, in October last year, that it was taking steps to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court (ICC), baffled many observers. The country is generally seen as a champion of human rights given its liberal constitution, the existence of strong civil society advocacy for the advancement…
Ecological trap ensnares endangered African penguins
▻https://news.mongabay.com/2017/02/ecological-trap-ensnares-endangered-african-penguins
Penguin numbers in South Africa’s Western Cape have plummeted by around 80 percent in recent decades. Biologists chalked this decline up to the disappearance of their favorite prey species, anchovies and sardines, from the Western Cape penguins’ preferred feeding grounds to the west of their nesting sites. Overfishing and changes in the water chemistry – knock-on effects of climate change – pushed breeding shoals of these fish eastward or wiped them out entirely.
Les manchots d’Afrique australe victimes d’un « piège écologique »
▻http://www.lemonde.fr/biodiversite/article/2017/02/09/les-manchots-d-afrique-du-sud-victimes-d-un-piege-ecologique_5077325_1652692
Faute de comprendre les transformations des océans par la surpêche et le changement climatique, les animaux jeunes choisissent des habitats qui ne suffisent plus à les nourrir.
#G4S to take over welfare support for families facing deportation
Home Office expected to announce controversial contractor will provide services rather than Barnardo’s charity
High levels of violence and use of force at last G4S-run child jail, report finds
Report says inspectors witnessed staff struggling to maintain order at #Oakhill secure training centre near #Milton_Keynes
▻https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/07/high-levels-of-violence-and-use-of-force-at-last-g4s-run-child-jail-rep
Message reçu via la mailing-list de Migreurop, le
29.06.2018:
Corporate Watch has just published updated company profiles of the UK’s four current detention profiteers.
Each profile looks at the company’s business basics, history, key business areas, strategies, finances, bosses and shareholders, and ends with a “Scandal Sheet” listing some notable crimes and misdemeanours.
G4S runs #Brook_House and #Tinsley_House. Mitie runs #Harmondsworth, #Colnbrook, #Campsfield, and recently took over the deportation “escorting” contract which includes running shorter term “holding facilities”. Serco runs #Yarl's_Wood. GEO Group, the second biggest US private prison company, runs #Dungavel.
Please get in touch if you have any further information to add on any of these companies. You can contact us securely through out contact page: ▻https://corporatewatch.org/contact
#G4S
▻https://corporatewatch.org/g4s-company-profile-2018
G4S is one of the world’s biggest security companies, active in over 90 countries. And it’s one of the world’s biggest employers of any kind, with around 570,000 staff. Most of its business is in providing guards and security tech to business clients, as well as cash transport.
Security is a global boom industry, and unlike other outsourcing giants G4S remains profitable and growing.
G4S also runs prisons and immigration detention centres in the UK, Australia and South Africa under its “G4S Care and Justice” subsidiary. These are amongst its most profitable contracts.
Although it recently sold most (but not all) of its controversial Israeli business, G4S works with Afghan warlords and in regimes like Syria or Sudan. It has a long record of scandals, failures and controversies – but keeps on winning new contracts.
▻https://corporatewatch.org/serco-company-profile-2018
Serco is an outsourcing company that specialises in public sector work. It runs services in five areas: defence, “justice and immigration”, health, transport, and “citizen services”. It works for 20 governments worldwide, but 40% of all its business remains in the UK, with another 19% in Australia as of 2017.
One of its biggest contracts is running 11 Australian immigration detention centres. In the UK, it runs Yarl’s Wood detention centre.
Serco has been hit by numerous scandals, most famously in 2013 when it was exposed along with G4S overcharging the government by millions on its electronic tagging contract.
Serco was the first of the big-name outsourcers to hit financial trouble recently, with a run of profits warnings starting in 2013. Damage was done by numerous loss-making contracts taken on as the company raced to expand. As a result the company had to ask shareholders for £530m to keep the company going in 2015. Serco is struggling to get back on track, but hopes that its outsourcing model will prove profitable again long term: prisons and wars still seem a winning bet. They’d better be: shareholders haven’t received a dividend in three years.
▻https://corporatewatch.org/mitie-company-profile-2018
Mitie is an outsourcing company providing a mixed bag of “facilities management” contract services to both corporations and government, from cleaning to consultancy. It is predominantly active in the UK.
Mitie is having tough times: after a series of profit warnings the company has lost money in the last two years. Since 2016 it has gone through a major management reshuffle, large scale restructuring and the sale of the failing MiHomecare business. And its 2016 accounts are under official investigation for presenting a false picture of the company’s
finances.
The company’s “Security” division has always remained profitable, as has the “Care and Custody” division that locks up migrants. Mitie is currently the UK’s biggest detention profiteer: it runs the two Heathrow detention centres and Campsfield in Oxfordshire; and it recently won the £525 million deportation “escorting” contract.
▻https://corporatewatch.org/geo-company-profile-2018
GEO is the second largest US private prisons company. It boasted of locking up 265,000 people in 2017.
* It is profitable and stable: the US prison regime shows no sign of shrinking, and president Donald Trump (to whom GEO has donated) is a supporter of the private prison industry.
*It has two UK contracts: #Dungavel immigration detention centre in Scotland; and prisoner transport for the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales, run by its UK joint venture #GEOAmey.
Detention centre profits: 20% and up for the migration prison bosses
Just how much money do companies make from locking up people in the UK’s privately run immigration detention centres? Our analysis, the first to study the detention industry overall, suggests that profit rates of 20% or more are standard.
The collapse of #Carillion has focused attention on the outsourcing corporations, who complain that government austerity is squeezing their once bountiful incomes. But immigration detention centres, along with prisons, remain very profitable. Of the UK’s eight long-term detention centres, seven are run by private contractors.
Our analysis of recent accounts released by US prison profiteer #GEO_Group show it could be making as much as a 30% profit margin from running Scotland’s #Dungavel detention centre. This comes after internal #G4S documents revealed the company was making over 20% profit on its notorious #Brook_House deal – and over 40% on the neighbouring #Tinsley_House centre. (See below for full analysis of these figures.)
Why is detention so profitable?
It is certainly the case that some outsourcing contracts have been losing a lot of money. Obvious examples are the “COMPASS” contracts to run housing for asylum seekers not in detention.i G4S and #Serco each have two of these deals, for different regions, and complain bitterly about them. Transport and healthcare are other areas where many have struggled – Mitie, for example, sold off all its home care business at a loss last year. Mitie’s latest annual report also notes particularly tight margins in a number of other common outsourcing areas, including cleaning and engineering maintenance. These losses will of course hit businesses’ overall results.
So why do detention contracts remain profitable? We can think of a number of reasons. One is the practice of using detainees, paid just £1 an hour, as effective slave labour. For example, GEO Group is reported to have saved over £727,000 in less than three years by paying Dungavel detainee labour below the minimum wage. Our 2014 report on detainee labour estimated the detention corporations between them could be saving £3 million a year by getting detainees to cook, clean, and maintain their own prisons.
Another is that, as there is very little scrutiny of detention contracts, contractors can cut costs further by under-staffing and stripping facilities to a minimum. As we reported in 2015, detention outsourcers are allowed to “self audit” their own performance, with minimal checking by the Home Office. Meanwhile the voices of those in detention themselves, stigmatised as “illegals” and stripped of any rights, are rarely heard.
Another reason is that these are relatively large deals with only a handful of specialist bidders (so forming an “oligopoly” who can keep prices high). There is not the same competitive pressure on margins as in, say, a general “facilities management” contract.
Also, these companies know the business very well. The very-first purpose built immigration detention centre, Harmondsworth, was run by Securicor (now part of G4S) on opening in 1970. The rash of new PFI-funded detention centres opened during the Blair government were also handed straight into private management.
Headline loss-making deals tend to be ones where outsourcing companies, seeking to keep growing their businesses in a tougher environment, push into new areas they haven’t tried before. For example, G4S and Serco came into the COMPASS deals with no experience as housing landlords. And in multi-million mega deals like COMPASS or a train line, a mistake can mean big losses indeed. Amongst the detention profiteers, Serco is particularly vulnerable as its whole £2 billion business is based on about 300 big government contracts.
In general, while many other service contracts are being squeezed in today’s austerity conditions, locking people up remains good business. So does security more generally, in a world of increasing insecurity and inequality. This is ultimately why outsourcers who focus just on security and imprisonment like G4S and GEO Group are growing and turning a healthy profit. And this is why all the outsourcers keep bidding for detention contracts, alongside promoting the private prison industry.
At a time where other government deals in sectors such as housing or transport are blowing up in corporations’ faces, locking people up is the outsourcing gift that keeps giving. Prison and immigration control industries are fuelled by insecurity, inequality, and xenophobia – and recent trends suggest the rush to lock up society’s unwanted is not going away. Or as Serco’s latest Annual Report puts it:
“we can be very confident that the world will still need prisons, will still need to manage immigration … a prison custody officer can sleep soundly in the knowledge that his or her skills will be required for years to come.”
Analysis: up to 30% profits at Dungavel
Neither the Home Office nor the outsourcing companies publish the profits made on detention or other contracts. Such information is typically impervious to Freedom of Information requests: the public right to know is overruled by companies’ rights to “commercial confidentiality”. Last September, a senior G4S executive refused to disclose detention profits even when questioned by MPs in parliament. And accounting regulations do not require the companies – which mostly run a range of different businesses – to disclose details of individual contracts.
However, there is one case where we can get a sense of the money involved: Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) near Glasgow. Since 2011, this has been run by the Florida-based GEO Group, the Trump-donating private prison empire which runs many of the infamous ICE detention facilities in the US. (See our full profile of GEO here).
Dungavel is currently GEO’s only UK contract. The UK subsidiary that manages the contract, The GEO Group UK Ltd, files annual accounts with Companies House. Because all this company’s revenue appears to come from running Dungavel, these accounts give a unique insight into a detention profiteering contract.
GEO told us that, while the details of its contract are commercially sensitive, the profit margin is “in the single digits”. However it is not clear if they are talking about the profit rate originally agreed with the Home Office in the contract, or the profits that they actually make – which could be much higher.
The GEO Group UK Ltd’s revenue from “custody and offender management services” in 2017 was £5.2 million. The accounts tell us “cost of sales” – i.e. the costs incurred when delivering the contract, such as paying staff, maintaining the centre, feeding and monitoring those detained – came to £3.6m in 2017. That leaves a profit margin of 30%: very much in line with the sums G4S is reportedly making. The Dungavel profit margin is harder to discern in prior years as GEO held other contracts, including Harmondsworth detention centre until 2014. Even so, margins for all their operations have consistently been around 20% or above since 2011.
GEO group told us this profit margin “isn’t solely related to the contract at Dungavel House, and therefore the contract is not our sole means of profitability”. However the accounts do not list any other source of revenue in 2017.ii
We asked GEO to clarify but they did not respond. Published Home Office data show the contract is worth £45.2m over eight years: so it seems likely that the vast bulk, if not all, of the company’s money and operating costs are from running Dungavel. We also asked GEO what happens if their profit in fact exceeds the “single figure” rate specified in their contract. Do they pass cost savings on to the Home Office? Again, they did not respond.
Besides “cost of sales”, GEO Group UK Ltd’s accounts also list “administrative expenses” of £0.7m in 2017. This takes the final “net” profit of the UK subsidiary as a whole down to a mere £1 million in 2017. And administrative expenses are significantly higher in previous years. The question is: how much of these are essential to running the detention centre? Or what part relate, for example, to moving money around a multi-national company, or shmoozing politicians and touting for new contracts?
GEO told us these “cover the cost of operating the contract”, including “operations, utilities, repair and maintenance, programs, rent and lease expense and insurances”. However, accounting custom is usually to include all the costs directly incurred in the running of the contract in “cost of sales”, described above. And it is not clear which of GEO’s “administrative costs” here are necessary for the running of Dungavel or for their UK head office. There are also the costs involved in bidding for new contracts, which the company’s accounts repeatedly reference, plus, prior to 2017, significant foreign exchange losses on loans they have taken from their US-based parent.
Again, we asked GEO for further clarification but did not hear back. It is impossible to say for sure without seeing their internal data. But the published accounts suggest the amounts GEO is making simply from running Dungavel are likely similar to those reported for G4S.
20% profits at Brook House
Internal G4S documents, which were reported on by the BBC and The Guardian last September, show similar high profit rates at that company’s Gatwick detention centres, Brook House and Tinsley House.
As the Guardian reported, the Brook House contract made a profit rate of over 20.7% in 2016, and Tinsley House made over 41.5% – although this may be distorted because the centre was closed for part of the year. Profits in earlier years were slightly lower, but still typically around 20% or more.
Like Dungavel, the original Brook and Tinsley House contracts signed in 2009 set official profit margins in the “single figures”. For Brook House, this is 6.8%. So G4S’ internal profit figures are well above what they are supposed to be making on the contracts.
When questioned in parliament about these figures by the Home Affairs Select Committee, G4S’ regional director Peter Neden said that they based on “incomplete information”. But he refused to disclose any more “complete” figures. According to the BBC, Neden argued that doing so would “help competitors”, and said the reported profits “did not take account of costs, including human resources and IT. He said the company’s profits were not more than 20%, but he would not confirm what level they were.”
Of course, without seeing the full G4S figures, there is no way to tell what these “human resources and IT” costs were. “Human resources” here, seems likely to refer to the company’s central management costs, as the wages of staff actually working in the centres are already included. But it seems highly unlikely that management costs and “IT” would be as high as 15% of all revenue – which is what would bring G4S’ profits down to their contractual levels.
In fact G4S’ published accounts also support the picture of extreme profits, if we put a bit of work into analysing them. G4S’ detention centre business is run through a subsidiary with the Orwellian name “G4S Care and Justice Services (UK)”. Immigration detention is only a part of this subsidiary’s business. It also runs five prisons for the Ministry of Justice, and the loss-making COMPASS contract to house asylum-seekers outside of detention. (See our full G4S Company Profile for more detail.)
G4S Care and Justice Services’ revenue was £335.41 million in 2016/17, the most recent reported year (£333.01 million in 2015). After operational costs of £290.2m, the profit rate directly from these contracts was £29.29 million, or 9% of revenue (in 2016, £30.13 million, or 9%).iii
At first sight, this seems much lower than the internal figures. However, these figures are significantly impacted by major losses from non-detention contracts. Above all, this means the big COMPASS deal to house asylum seekers outside detention. G4S won the two COMPASS contracts for the North East, Yorkshire and Humberside; and the Midlands and East of England – and has been complaining ever since that it’s losing heavily on the deal.
For example, in its 2016 accounts G4S Care and Justice adds £14.2 million to its costs to represent an “onerous contracts charge” – that is, money it expects to lose on the COMPASS deal. The year before it recorded a £20.7 million “onerous contracts charge”. It also makes other adjustments related to “commercial disputes” and old PFI contracts.
To see what the figures look like without the impact of COMPASS and other “onerous” non-detention losses, we can first re-calculate gross profit using the company’s “cost of sales excluding specific items”. This starts to more accurately reflect what G4S made from running its detention centres and prisons. On this basis, gross profits were £45.25 million in 2016, 13.5% of revenue, and £50.83 million in 2015, or 15%.
But in fact these are still under-estimates. This is because, to calculate profit rates with COMPASS stripped out, we also need to remove COMPASS’ contribution to revenue and costs. We do not know exactly what this is, but can estimate it from total contract values that the Home Office has disclosed. Combined, G4S’ two COMPASS contracts are valued at £765 million, over a total seven years (2012-19). So roughly £109 million per year, about one third of G4S “Care and Justice” total turnover.
Take this off revenue and cost of sales and the profit rate was actually 20%.iv This is in the territory of the internal documents.
As with GEO, additional costs such as “human resources and IT” referenced by Peter Neden to the MPs may well be included in “administrative expenses” section of the accounts, which would reduce this profit rate. Without seeing their full internal accounts there is no way of knowing the exact rate, and these calculations are unavoidably imprecise.v But as with GEO, the information we have available from published accounts appears to show the company is making very high returns indeed from its detention and prison business.
Mitie and Serco
The two other detention profiteers are Mitie, which runs the two Heathrow centres (Harmondsworth and Colnbrook), and Campsfield House in Oxfordshire; and Serco, which runs Yarl’s Wood. (See our full company profiles on Mitie and Serco for more information.)
Unfortunately there is not the same available information on these two companies’ detention profits as for GEO and G4S. So far, no internal documents have come to light from Mitie or Serco. And their published accounts mix detention contracts alongside other business lines.
What we do know is that both companies see detention as amongst their most profitable operations, and continue to actively bid for new detention contracts. We have no reason to believe that the detention centres they run aren’t just as profitable as Dungavel or Brook House.
If you have any further information on these companies or their detention contracts please get in touch. You can contact us securely through our contact page.
Conclusion: detention is good business
Following the Carillion collapse, a chorus of outsourcing corporations have complained about how times are hard and profits meagre in the age of austerity. But there is a world of difference amongst outsourcing contracts. In some sectors, margins are undoubtedly tighter than in the boom days of Labour’s public-private giveaway. Elsewhere, though, the party continues.
It is important here not to take the companies’ complaints at face value. For example, in 2015 the Financial Times cited unnamed “analysts” estimating sharp decline in detention centre profit margins “from 12 to 13 per cent 10 years ago to between 5 and 7 per cent now.” This was as Mitie explained how the terms of its new contract for the Heathrow centres pushed it to reduce staff and extend lock-up hours. In fact, after its first year of running the centres, Mitie Care & Custody’s profits were up six-fold. From the figures we’ve looked at above, if there has been some margin tightening this must mean that previous contracts were bounteous indeed.
Annex: Detention contracts, size and value
Please note these are necessarily rough estimates. Access to Home Office figures is sporadic and incomplete, to say the least, relying on occasional leaks or vague answers to Freedom of Information Act (FOI) requests.
Heathrow: Harmondsworth and Colnbrook
contracted to Mitie, September 2014-22
number of beds: 1,065
total value at award: £240m
value per year: £30 million – roughly £28,000 per bed
Campsfield
contracted to Mitie, May 2011-19
number of beds: 282
total value at award: £42 million
value per year: £5.25 million – roughly £19,000 per bed
Gatwick: Brook House
contracted to G4S, May 2009-18; now extended to 2020
current number of beds: 558 (after recent expansion)
total value at award: £90.4 million
value per year: £10m – or roughly £18,000 per bed
Gatwick: Tinsley House
contracted to G4S, May 2009-18; now extended to 2020
current number of beds: 178
total value at award: £43.6 million
value per year: £4.8 million – or roughly £27,000 per bed
Yarl’s Wood
contracted to Serco, 2015-23
number of beds: 349 (average occupancy)
total value (calculated at award): £69.9 million
value per year: £8.8 million – or roughly £25,000 per bed
Dungavel
contracted to GEO, 2011-19
current number of beds: 249
total value: £45.2 million
value per year: £5.65 million – or roughly £23,000 per bed
Morton Hall
Run by Her Majesty’s Prison Service (HMPS).
Notes
i- COMPASS stands for “Commercial and Operational Managers Procuring Asylum Support Services”. The contracts were awarded in 2012, and are due to end in 2019. See our G4S company Profile for more detail.
ii- GEO’s only other UK business is the 50/50 joint venture GEOAmey, which runs prisoner transport for the Ministry of Justice in England and Wales. But this income is treated separately, and does not feature on the GEO Group UK accounts.
iii- Both years are knocked down by “administrative expenses” of £24.19 million (£21.51 million). Final pre-tax profits then become £10.25 million, or 3% (£12.07 million, or 3.6%, in 2015). After tax, Care and Justice booked £7.93 million, or 2.4% (£9.16 million, or 2.8% in 2015).
iv- To calculate this we also subtracted the estimated COMPASS revenue of £109 million from the overall revenue of £335.4 million, to give an adjusted non-COMPASS revenue of £226.4 million. And we also subtracted it from the cost of sales (excluding non-specific items) of £290.2 million, to give adjusted cost of sales of £181.2 million. This leaves a £45.2 million gross profit.
v- For example, we cannot be sure that G4S has receive the full value of the contracts in annual payments – it might be, e.g., that payments were reduced due to penalties for poor performance, although this has not been made public. This would make the actual profit rates lower than our estimates. However, they would still be very considerable. And no records of any such penalties have been published, to our knowledge.
#crime in #South_Africa
▻http://africasacountry.com/2017/02/crime-in-south-africa
The cover and title of the journalist Don Pinnock’s Gang Town seem to promise a sensational tour of meth dens and children caught in the crossfire. Instead, the book patiently explains something far more grim: what happens when the legacy of South Africa’s 1950 Group Areas Act, and decades of impoverishing and alienating policies, meet an unprecedented increase in youth population. Pinnock, who […]
#CULTURE #Books #Cape_Town #criminology #gang_culture #Johannesburg #Literature #police #reviews
#crime in #South_Africa
▻http://africasacountry.com/2017/02/crime-in-cape-town
The cover and title of the journalist Don Pinnock’s Gang Town seem to promise a sensational tour of meth dens and children caught in the crossfire. Instead, the book patiently explains something far more grim: what happens when the legacy of South Africa’s 1950 Group Areas Act, and decades of impoverishing and alienating policies, meet an unprecedented increase in youth population. Pinnock, who […]
#CULTURE #Books #Cape_Town #gang_culture #Literature #police #reviews
Gang Town’s focus on Cape Town’s longue durée corruption of the social fabric of working class communities (…) sketches a city that has repeatedly deformed and destroyed social institutions that would otherwise channel the natural rebellions of young people away from gangs, drug abuse and violence. In a particularly insightful passage Pinnocks describes how forced removals under the Group Areas Act ripped up “networks of streets, houses, corner shops and shebeens, but also social webs of kin, friendship
How does the FAO Forest definition harm people and forests? An open letter to the FAO | WRM in English
▻http://wrm.org.uy/other-relevant-information/how-does-the-fao-forest-definition-harm-people-and-forests-an-open-letter-to
In September 2015, during the XIV World Forestry Congress, thousands of people took to the streets in Durban, South Africa, to protest against the problematic way in which the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), insists on defining forests (1). The FAO definition considers forests to be basically just “a bunch of trees”, while ignoring other fundamental aspects of forests, including their many other life-forms such as other types of plants, as well as animals, and forest-dependent human communities. Equally, it ignores the vital contribution of forests to natural processes that provide soil, water and oxygen. Besides, by defining ‘forests’ as only being a minimum area of land covered by a minimum number of trees of a minimum height and canopy percentage, FAO has actively promoted the establishment of many millions of hectares of industrial tree plantations, of mainly alien species, especially in the global South. As a consequence, only one particular sector has benefitted: the tree plantation industry. Industrial tree plantations have been the direct cause of many negative impacts on local communities and their forests; which have been well-documented
An interview with #Navi_Pillay
A refusal to shrink from difficult confrontations is a recurring theme in Navi Pillay’s career. During her six years as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights she took on the then Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa for failing to investigate the deaths of over 100,000 people in the last weeks and months of the country’s civil war, which ended in 2009 after 26 years. In response, the Sri Lankan government said that South African-born Pillay lacked objectivity because of her Tamil ancestry. An Indian diplomat told Pillay that her campaign to end caste discrimination was unfair because it humiliated India on a world stage. A Syrian ambassador called her a “lunatic”. Some western countries (including the UK) complained when she pointed out their failures to uphold certain human rights. “They said I should be focusing on distant countries where thousands of people are killed,” she said. “In other words, developing countries.”
Sur le #viol et les #viols_de_guerre :
This was after all how she was able to challenge the law on sexual violence in conflict, by listening to the testimony of rape survivors and drawing on the work of experts.
“I got a great deal of help from academics on creating this new jurisprudence, the gender jurisprudence. I felt in my heart that we have to render justice. That is what we are there for, to render justice and so if a woman complains about a brutal rape, we have to pay attention.”
Drone photography captures the dramatic inequality of #Nairobi
American photographer Johnny Miller, supported by Code for Africa and the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has tried to capture that inequality through aerial images taken by drone. Miller previously photographed similar scenes in Cape Town in South Africa. In some ways the inequality is worse in Kenya. “The level of poverty is much greater than in South Africa,” he says, noting the challenges of operating in Nairobi. “It is much more fast-paced, chaotic, and difficult to maneuver.”
https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/an-aerial-photo-of-kibera-in-nairobi.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=3200#.jpg 
https://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/dji_0395.jpg?quality=80&strip=all&w=3200#.jpg
When is a terrorist not a ‘terrorist’ ?
▻http://www.leejarvis.com/?page_id=392
Quand il n’est pas « de couleur », notamment musulman.
Alors que...
Margaret Thatcher in 1987, for instance, famously said of Nelson Mandela’s group, the ANC: ‘The #ANC is a typical terrorist organisation … Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land’. Six years later #Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Authenticity in the Age of the Fake - Issue 42: Fakes
▻http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/authenticity-in-the-age-of-the-fake
The announcement of synthetic diamonds in 1955 was met with the same kind of alarm and skepticism that greeted claims to have made alchemical gold in the Middle Ages. Could these “fake” gems, created by a team at the General Electric research laboratories in Schenectady, New York really match the genuine article? One anonymous critic from California captured a widespread suspicion in blunt terms when he wrote to GE, saying: You can’t make real diamonds for they are nature grown. You can’t make gold; no one can. They dig gold out of the ground and also diamonds. But no one can make them with a machine. That is just a lot of bull. Yet what if it were true that diamonds really can be manufactured? When GE revealed the discovery, the stock of the De Beers diamond cartel in South Africa, which (...)
Suddenly it’s okay to be pro-Israel and anti-Semitic
When friendship for Israel is judged solely on the basis of support for the occupation, Israel has no friends other than racists and nationalists.
By Gideon Levy | Nov. 20, 2016 | 4:25 AM
►http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.754073
All of a sudden it’s not so terrible to be anti-Semitic. Suddenly it’s excusable as long as you hate Muslims and Arabs and “love Israel.” The Jewish and Israeli right has issued a sweeping amnesty to anti-Semitic lovers of Israel – yes, there is such a thing, and they’re en route to taking power in the United States.
So now we know: Not just pornography but also anti-Semitism is a matter of geography and price. Right-wing American anti-Semites are no longer considered anti-Semites.
The definition has been updated: From now on, anti-Semites are only found on the left. Roger Waters, a courageous man of conscience without stain, is an anti-Semite. Steve Bannon, a declared racist and closet anti-Semite who has been appointed chief strategist in the Trump White House, is a friend of Israel.
Jewish and Israeli activists who left no stone unturned in their effort to discover signs of anti-Semitism, who viewed every parking ticket for an American Jew as an act of hate, who moved heaven and earth every time a Jew was robbed or a Jewish gravestone was cracked, are now whitewashing an anti-Semite. Suddenly they’re not convinced we’re talking about that particular disease.
Alan Dershowitz, one of the biggest propagandists in this field, has already come out in defense of the racist Bannon. In a Haaretz piece late last week, Dershowitz wrote that the man whose wife said he didn’t want their children to go to school with Jews isn’t anti-Semitic. “The claim was simply made by his former wife in a judicial proceeding, thus giving it no special weight,” Dershowitz wrote, with specious logic.
After all, Dershowitz’s former research assistant, an Orthodox Jew who later worked with Bannon, assured him that he had seen no signs of anti-Semitism in Bannon. And suddenly that’s enough for Dershowitz. Suddenly it’s possible to separate racism from anti-Semitism.
Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Ron Dermer, naturally hastened to join the party. Over the weekend, he said he expects to work with Bannon. And boy, does he expect to work with that racist. After all, they’ll agree about everything: that there’s no Palestinian people, that there’s no occupation, that the settlement of Yitzhar should remain forever, that leftists are traitors.
For Dermer – ambassador of the illegal outpost of Amona, friend of the Tea Party and boycotter of J Street; a man who if the bilateral relationship had been normal would have been declared persona non grata by the United States – the new appointments are like the dawn of a new day.
He’ll feel so at home with Frank Gaffney, another hater of Muslims who’s likely to receive a senior appointment in the new administration; he’ll be so happy working with Bannon. And Mike Huckabee is exactly his cup of tea. Dermer, after all, was given the Freedom Flame Award by the Center for Security Policy, a hate group that proudly flies the flag of Islamophobia.
These racists and their ilk are Israel’s best friends in the United States. They’re joined by the racists of the European right. If you discount the guilt feelings over the Holocaust, they’re the only friends Israel has left. When friendship for Israel is judged solely on the basis of support for the occupation, Israel has no friends other than racists and nationalists. That ought to have aroused great shame here: Tell us who your friends are and we’ll tell you who you are.
These racists love Israel because it’s carrying out their dreams: to oppress Arabs, to abuse Muslims, to dispossess them, expel them, kill them, demolish their houses, trample their honor. This bunch of trash would so dearly love to behave as we do.
But for now this is only possible in Israel, so it’s the light unto the nations in this field. What happened to the days when Jews in South Africa went to prison with Nelson Mandela? Nowadays Jewish activists in America support the new rulers – the racists and anti-Semites.
The Palestinian-American author Susan Abulhawa wrote on Facebook over the weekend: Palestinians are calling white nationalist Bannon an anti-Semite, while AIPAC and Dershowitz think he’s not such a bad guy. What more proof do you need that Zionism is a face of white supremacy, and ultimately antithetical to Judaism?
Last summer, Abulhawa was deported via the Allenby Bridge. And she’s right. The United States and Israel now share the same values – and woe to that sense of shame.