Tales of Corruption

By IRIN News, www.irinnews.org

Zimbabwe's urban residents have to grease the palms of officials to ensure they can get access to water supply and sanitation services, as dysfunctional as they are with leaking water pipes and frequent power outages. Edmore Mbirimi, a resident of Chitungwiza, a satellite town 35km from the capital, Harare, told IRIN what happened when the sewage pipe at his house burst. "It was on the sixth visit that a young employee accosted me on my way out and bluntly told me that nothing would be fixed unless I ‘dropped a feather’, suggesting that I had to pay the plumbers for them to repair the burst pipe". The public works officials have now stalled work at his home after he attempted to report the corruption to higher authorities, who also failed to take action.

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By Mark Worth, June 25th 2007

According to Aborigine lore, the Murray River was created when Ngurunderi the Great Ancestor chased after Ponde the Giant Cod, which carved bends in the river with its tail as he thrashed to escape. When Ngurunderi finally caught the fish, he cut it into pieces and threw them into the river. With each toss a new species was born. “You bony bream, you perch, you callop, you catfish.”

Today, southeastern Australian’s Murray River Basin provides a different kind of bounty. It is the nation’s food bowl, generating fully one-third of Australia's food supply. Nearly all of the country’s rice is grown here. Huge amounts of wheat and other cereal grains, milk, cheese, citrus and stone fruit, wine grapes and vegetables are produced here. Millions of sheep and beef cattle graze here, too.

What there isn’t enough of, though, is water... Keep on reading…

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By Mark Worth

It’s been called a “Ghandian nonviolent struggle.” Countless protests involving thousands of people have been held throughout the country. Hundreds of people have gone on hunger strikes. Dozens have been arrested, including children. The standoff has received worldwide attention, turning residents of impoverished villages into international causes célèbres.

India vs. Coke is a classic conflict between a powerful transnational corporation trying to expand its worldwide reach, and a developing nation working to preserve its sovereignty against the forces of globalisation.

The struggle has reached numerous climaxes. Perhaps the biggest came when the small southwestern state of Kerala ordered Coke to shut down its bottling plant in Plachimada, a remote village of about 9,000 on the Malabar Coast. For years, residents had complained the 561,000-litre-per-day factory was sucking drinking-water wells dry. Waste from the facility, among the largest of Coke’s 50 in India, was also blamed for polluting groundwater and soil.

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Compiled by Venkatesh Nayak for CHRI
(…) Keolari village, situated in Katni district, Madhya Pradesh in India, is home to about 2,500 people. Munnalal Patel is an elected Pancha (member) of the Keolari gram panchayat (elected local self governing body at the village level). His father had donated an open well to the panchayat in 1997 hoping that it would be maintained by them for people’s use. This well (…) is one of the only two sources of potable water available within Keolari. (…) Except for a handful of rich families which own private tube wells on their property, most of the residents of Keolari depend on the well located in the middle of the village. In December last year (2006) Munnalal began constructing a house on a small plot of land adjacent to this public well (…) constructed a boundary wall around the well in a bid to claim it for himself. Villagers whose access to the well was cut off tried to reason with Munnalal, in vain. …

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By Mark Worth, March 15th 2007

Words traditionally used to describe the view of the Mississippi River from the waterfront promenade near Café du Monde are now being used to depict the corruption arising from Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts.

“It is just breathtaking,” said U.S. Senator Susan Collins. “The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, the scale of the waste.”

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Written by Glenis Balangue

On October 15, 2004, AnakPawis Party List/Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, May First Movement) regional coordinator Sammy Bandilla was shot dead while his companion, a member of the Leyte Metropolitan Water District-Employees Association (LMWD-EA), was seriously wounded. What started as a peaceful protest against the illegal dismissal of 26 water district employees has turned bloody. AnakPawis and KMU linked the killing to the general manager of the LMWD, Engineer Ranulfo Feliciano.
(…)
This is the second killing related to allegations of corruption within the LMWD. Last year, Eleazar Josef, an employee of the LMWD was killed when it was discovered that he had documents to prove the corrupt acts at the LMWD.
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