Current Issue

In our August newsletter we asked what constitutes a just response when our global political economy is generating deepening deprivation, conflict and inequality, and when powerful actors fuelling and gaining from these conditions appear to be able to act without penalty? You contributed on the realities we are facing and what a just response demands.

From different countries in east and southern Africa you pointed to global issues- conflict, climate extremes, and economic shocks - that are deepening inequality and insecurity. You noted that intensified extraction of minerals and biodiversity and rising debt burdens in the past decade are depleting public funds for health, education and other services, and that households are struggling with food security. Of the 6.6 million Zambian children, 71% are suffering from multiple dimensions of deprivation. Poverty conditions are associated with crime, gender-based violence (where rates in South Africa are among the highest in the world), discrimination and other forms of conflict.

Informal workers make up a large share of producers in our region. In Zimbabwe they are around 80% of the labour force, contributing about 60% of GDP. They work in harsh, often hazardous conditions for minimal fluctuating income, trading health for survival. Many are young people, facing insecure futures and bearing the brunt of climate impacts and economic shocks, with minimal social or institutional protection. Many small-scale miners in our region are extracting lithium and cobalt used in green transition technologies in high income countries, harming their health while generating wealth largely earned outside the region.

This situation represents daily violations of rights to health and its determinants, and a gap in the implementation of laws and policies that protect these rights. Those most affected are largely excluded from the national, international and corporate systems that are planning, accumulating, distributing and using the wealth from resources in the region.

Violence and rights violations reach their extreme when people are caught in military conflict. Not surprisingly this is often in areas of significant resources for wealth extraction. A humanitarian crisis and genocide in Sudan that has been ongoing since 2019 was profiled in October, with report of thousands of people massacred, and over 20 000 fleeing Al-Fashir alone. Of 40 million Sudanese people, over 20 million are reported to be nearing starvation and 10 million forced to leave their homes. Uganda, the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa, shelters over 1.6 million displaced people, despite its systems already being overstretched. In Sudan, cholera, malaria, dengue and malnutrition have escalated. Health services have not escaped violence. The World Health Organization reports that 460 patients and their companions were killed at the Saudi Maternity Hospital in El Fasher in October 2025. Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said that prior to this latest attack, WHO had verified 285 attacks on healthcare in Sudan with at least 1204 deaths and over 400 injuries of health workers and patients since the start of the conflict.

In 2018, Sudanese women, youth, workers, and professionals protested en masse against economic hardship and authoritarian rule, with demands for freedom, peace, and justice. Yet interests in Sudan’s significant gold resources by countries and military forces contradict these social demands for equitable revenue distribution. Violence appears to serve, rather than disrupt extraction, with gold, livestock, and agricultural exports continuing, and in some cases increasing, during the conflict, despite the social devastation and rhetorical commitments to peace.

What is the response to these various dimensions of injustice?

One response has been as protest. In Madagascar in September, young Gen Z protesters took to the streets to demand economic opportunities, a leadership that will improve their quality of life, and to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. Disillusioned with the government, protestors rejected government calls for talks, demanding the president’s resignation. The president fled in October, and the military took power, forming a transitional committee with the promise to restore civilian rule. Whether this will produce the change that motivated the protests remains to be seen.

As for young people in Madagascar, the responses to our question in August showed clear aspirations for a more just society: One that invests in secure jobs, livelihoods, communities and services, where people access affordable water, housing, clean energy, infrastructures and services; that prioritises social development over individual wealth accumulation and respects human rights. The call is also for dehumanising violence to end. As WHO noted in relation to the military attacks in Sudan, “All attacks on healthcare must stop immediately and unconditionally,” and health workers and civilians should be protected under international law.

These changes call for communities everywhere to be protected, organised, empowered and heard, in a culture of solidarity and accountable, democratic governance. Recognising people as active agents in inclusive, locally-grounded approaches is seen to be an essential foundation for building a fairer, just future. This demands a clear strategy to rebuild societies from the damage of neoliberalism, debt, structural adjustment, extraction and violence. Without this, protest simply brings new hands on the steering wheel, while the inequity continues.

The responses pointed to the role of regional solidarity, self-determination, strategies and standards in generating more inclusive economies, providing space and accountability for policy innovation. They indicate confidence that we have the assets, capacities and social demand in the region to build a fairer alternative, if we reclaim resources, states, and collective values.

However, whether locally, nationally or regionally, people struggle within global systems that protect existing privilege and wealth, and that encourage leaderships to do the same.

Hence the disappointment that multilateralism and United Nations institutions have failed to enforce international law, or to set a global political economy framework that confronts inequality. Of the 140 targets in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set in 2015 to be met by 2030, only 12% are said to be on track, 50% to be moderately or severely off track, and 30% have either stagnated or regressed. While some point to a funding barrier, and there is indeed a reported $4 trillion yearly funding deficit to meet the SDG targets, there is a deeper critique. There is no shared vision of the alternative global political economy that can embed such development goals, and an unwillingness to disrupt powerful economic interests. So global financial institutions and private lenders continue to prioritise fiscal wellbeing over social or planetary wellbeing, UN institutions fail to protect vulnerable populations against deprivation, exploitation and even genocide, and powerful actors globally spin narratives that hide the realities on the ground.

Issa G. Shivji, the prominent Africa thinker asks: will naming and shaming over these violations shake power into action? Or if power is amoral, how do you confront it? His answer is to keep unmasking a capitalist political economy that trumps morality, values and humanity in its relentless pursuit of profit and insatiable thirst for accumulation. Samir Amin argues for ‘delinking’ and building sufficient political power in the region to construct self-determined development strategies that are not in servitude to global value chains. Some point to China, with its large public sector and high levels of public investment that override private corporate interests in the economy. Others point to successful wellbeing economies. There are options. They demand social debate at all levels, and accountability to public interest.

Neither can we let multilateralism off the hook, given its role in transnational taxes, pricing, financial flows, trade, intellectual property and other global processes affecting the region. While the UN is being weakened and subjugated by market forces and power imbalances, it cannot be lost to drivers of inequity. When established in October 80 years ago, the UN aimed to promote peace, human rights and international co-operation. This mandate is still undelivered. One commentator observed that if the UN was disbanded on a Friday, it would be reinvented by Monday. Protecting what is democratic, such as the one state, one vote in the WHO and the General Assembly, and changing what is not, such as the undemocratic composition of the Security Council or health-harming intellectual property rules are part of that reinvention.

The most harmful consequence of injustice is when people lose the confidence and understanding that they have the power to produce change. However, your responses highlight that inequality, extraction and impunity are not inevitable. There are building blocks, ideas, strategies, alliances and diverse terrains of action that show this.

We welcome your feedback or queries on the issues raised in this oped – please send them to the EQUINET secretariat.