Ghana’s Chamber of Mines demand for proceeds from minerals to benefit local communities

14/01/2013

The Ghana Chamber of Mines wants proceeds realised from the country’s mineral wealth to benefit local communities.

And the Chamber is now advocating for a national mining vision and policy to direct and regulate the inflows from that sector into proper development projects.

“Due to lack of a clear policy direction the country and particularly host communities feel neglected from benefiting from minerals extracted from their areas,” said Dr. Toni Aubynn, the Chief Executive Officer of the Chamber. 

The Ghana media reported today that Dr Aubynn who was speaking to Journalists in the Western Region noted that although 80 per cent of all mineral proceeds ended up at the door of central government, only 10 per cent was used for projects in affected communities.

He said the lack of visible infrastructure development in host communities had provoked agitation in host communities that sometimes resulted in conflicts.

Dr. Aubynn said in 2011, mining companies paid about US$ 3.1 billion, representing 75 per cent of mineral revenue through the Bank of Ghana and the commercial banks against the statutory requirement of 25 per cent.

The Ghana Chamber of Mines also wants a Minerals Revenues Fund to be established just like the Petroleum Revenue Fund to be channeled into specific areas of development – MGW.

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Spanish Scientists develop vaccine that temporarily breaks HIV

14/01/2012

A team of Spanish researchers say they have developed a therapeutic vaccine that can temporarily break growth of the HIV virus in infected patients.

The vaccine, based on immune cells exposed to HIV that had been inactivated with heat, was tested on a group of 36 people carrying the virus and the results were the best yet recorded for such a treatment, the team said.

Felipe Garcia, one of the scientists in the team at Barcelona University’s Hospital Clinic said: “What we did was give instructions to the immune system so it could learn to destroy the virus, which it does not do naturally”.

The therapeutic vaccine, a shot that treats an existing disease rather than preventing it, was safe and led to a dramatic drop in the amount of HIV virus detected in some patients, said the study published on January 2, 2013 in Science Translation Medicine.

After 12 weeks of the trial, the HIV viral load dropped by more than 90 percent among 12 of the 22 patients who received the vaccine. Only one among the 11 patients who received a control injection without the vaccine experienced a similar result.

After 24 weeks, the effectiveness had begun to decline, however, with seven of the 20 remaining patients receiving the vaccine enjoying a similar 90-percent slump in viral load. No-one in the control group of 10 patients experienced such a decline in the virus.

The vaccine lost its effectiveness after a year, when the patients had to return to their regular combination therapy of anti-retroviral drugs.

Researchers said the results were similar to those achieved with a single anti-retroviral drug, used to block the growth of HIV.

“It is the most solid demonstration in the scientific literature that a therapeutic vaccine is possible,” they said in a statement.

The vaccine allowed patients temporarily to live without taking multiple medicines on a daily basis, which created hardship for patients, could have toxic side-effects over the long term and had a high financial price, the team said.

“This investigation opens the path to additional studies with the final goal of achieving a functional cure – the control of HIV replication for long periods or an entire life without anti-retroviral treatment,” the researchers said in a statement.

“Although we still have not got a functional cure, the results published today open the possibility of achieving an optimal therapeutic vaccine, or a combination of strategies that includes a therapeutic vaccine, and could help to reach that goal,” they said.

The team said it took seven years to get to this point, and the researchers would now work on improving the vaccine and combining it with other therapeutic vaccines over the next three or four years.

According to latest UN figures, the number of people infected by HIV worldwide rose to 34 million in 2011 from 33.5 million in 2010. 

AFP

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Indo – Zambia Bank or ZANACO to pay for travel documents?

Column:
11/01/2012The Immigration department in any given country IS one of the many departments of government like Transport, Communications, Energy, Water, Mines and Minerals, Forestry and Tourism, Foreign Affairs, Education, Lands as well as Health…..etc,  that can aid the revenue department in quickly meeting revenue collection targets for a particular year.The question one would however ask is, have these departments and Ministries performed up to their status as money spinners through the services they provide for Zambia? Perhaps one may not actually be wrong to say that actually most of these Ministries and departments have in the past not been able to contributed as expected to the country’s revue coffers.

Now it has been decided that all the money paid for documents issued by the Passport Office should be done so through Indo-Zambia Bank. I will give this new payment procedure just one month and thereafter three months and then check on how much money will be collected from such public services provided. We shall compare the one month, three months and six months of payments made through Indo-Zambia Bank to the same period when you my brothers and sisters at this department in particular were directly responsible for charging and receiving the payments.

We will also assess among those seeking these services from the Immigration Department whether this new payment procedure is convenient and readily available as and when they seek such.

We shall be assessing how will be the attitude of the workers at the Immigration Department now that they “may” never be handling money for the public services they provide.

We will also check and interrogate what is in this deal for Indo-Zambia Bank. We hope too that the Bank which is owned by both India and Zambia will be able to show us how the money collected from sales of services under this new procedure will be transmitted to government coffers and whether the Bank is allowed to reinvest in itself such money as a way of increasing Zambia’s stake in its operations. We shall also be asking the Ministry responsible how they arrived at Indo-Zambia Bank and not Zambia National Commercial Bank (ZANACO) or any other which have a rather wider network as this would have made it easy for citizens and other people to access such services. We will be able so to find out the accountability procedures put in place to ensure that all the money collected is accounted for. We will be asking Indo-Zambia Bank to disclose how much percentage, if this is how the deal is crafted, they will be getting from the KR370 paid for obtaining a Zambian Passport.

#more questions coming up#

Crisis in Syria: UK sets out further action in the coming weeks.

 60,000 Syrians are now believed to have died,  Foreign Secretary William Hague has updated Parliament.