Stay-home strike against price hikes cripples capital

Niger’s capital ground to a halt on Tuesday as a stay-home protest against a tax on staple goods like flour and milk closed shops and markets and kept traffic off the streets. “There’s no public transport, the shops are shuttered and there’s practically no traffic and no one on the streets,” said an African diplomat reached by phone. “Security has been beefed up, the situation’s calm.” The protest was the second in a week called by some 30 groups gathered in a “coalition against costly living” that includes trade unions and human rights and consumer groups. The coalition, which last week claimed to have rallied the biggest protest ever seen in Niamey, is demanding the government withdraw a law introduced in January's budget which slapped 19 percent Value Added Tax (VAT) on everyday items such as flour, milk and sugar, as well as on water and electricity. Last Tuesday a crowd of up to 20,000 protesters marched through the streets of dusty Niamey to pressure the government to reduce the price of basic foods and goods in a country that ranks second from bottom on the UN Human Development Index. The change of tactics to a stay-home protest came after authorities refused to authorise a second street march. More than 60 percent of the landlocked semi-desert nation’s 11 million people live on less than a dollar a day. And last year's locust invasion coupled with poor rainfall has already led to worrisome food shortages. ”At a time when the people are hungry we cannot understand how the government of Niger can promulgate laws that increase food prices,” Mustapha Kadi, a spokesman for the coalition, said in an interview on Radio France Internationale. But the government is standing firm. It says the hikes are needed to fill government coffers and reduce deficits. Government spokesman Ben Omar said on national television on Monday evening that the government would not back down. The new VAT was in line with guidelines issued by the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), he said. Kadi, the coalition spokesman, countered that people in the poorest country in UEMOA were being forced to pay the most tax. The protests over food hikes come only three months after President Mamadou Tandja, a 66-year-old retired army colonel, won re-election for a second five-year term in a vote foreign observers described as fair and democratic. Food shortage looms The furore over food prices and a looming food shortage will be the immediate challenge facing Tandja this year. Officials from the Agriculture Ministry have said that Niger would have to import hundreds of thousands of tonnes of cereals in 2005 to make up for shortfalls in the 2004 harvest and the government estimates more than three million people are at risk. Last December the Niger government began subsidising grain prices in the southwestern Tillabery region bordering Mali and Burkina Faso, one of the areas hardest hit by last year’s dire combination of hungry locusts and faltering rain. On Tuesday, the World Food Programme (WFP) appealed for US $10 million to help 800,000 people in Mali and Niger. It said Niger faced a food deficit of nearly a quarter of a million tonnes this year. “These people are urgently in need of humanitarian assistance,” WFP’s regional West Africa director Mustapha Darboe said in a statement. Depending on meagre earnings from the export of cotton and uranium, only one in five of Niger’s inhabitants enjoys proper sanitation and only four out of 10 have access to clean drinking water, according to UN estimates. But a foreign diplomat based in Niamey told IRIN that the current protests did not appear to be a threat to stability in spite of the desperate poverty across the country. Isolated incidents broke out on the fringes of last week’s march in Niamey, when youths torched cars and smashed property. Police detained more than 40 people. “There has been no real violence,“ said the diplomat, who asked not to be named. “What could be considered deplorable is that the authorities chose to ban the march the coalition had planned today.”