Tag Archives: Africa

Lungu narrowly wins Zambia special election

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zambia-flagDefense Minister Edgar Lungu has very narrowly won Zambia’s Special Presidential Election after a heavily contested three-month campaign. The final margin was reportedly 48.3% to 46.7%.

He will take over the office from interim President Guy Scott, who was (briefly) the continent’s first White head of state in two decades. (Off the continent, Paul Bérenger was elected Prime Minister of Mauritus, the African islands nation in the Indian Ocean, back in 2003.)

Mr. Lungu, who often clashed publicly with the former Vice President (the latter was ineligible to run) had served as Designated Acting President off and on for the year preceding President Sata’s death in office, any time Mr. Sata was out of the country seeking treatment for his prolonged illness. The Constitution automatically elevated Mr. Scott, however, to the caretaker spot upon the president’s death for a 90-day period until a Special Election could be held to elect someone to finish the remainder of the current term.

zambia-vice-president-Guy-Scott-us-government-photoThe interim Scott administration was not without action — he signed into law a number of key business and economic bills from the National Assembly — or without controversy — including some questionable Christmas pardons, a meeting with Robert Mugabe as “good personal friends,” and open feuding with his own party and Mr. Lungu. But despite their differences, President Scott did at least eventually loyally campaign for Minister Lungu as their party’s nominee in the race.

France and Nigeria terrorism: Dramatically different coverage

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In April 2014, almost 300 girls attending a secondary school in Chibok, Nigeria were kidnapped from their school in the middle of the night. They were abducted by an Islamic extremist group dubbed Boko Haram, who have been launching attacks against schools and villages in Nigeria, Chad and Cameroon.

Sadly, they targeted the girls in part because of their belief that the “inauthentic” colonialism-descended education system is a sin. The girls’ schooling was detrimental to their mission to overthrow the Nigerian government in order to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state. Making things worse was the lack of media coverage of the kidnapping. It seemed that the information about the kidnapping only reached international headline news after a heavy Twitter campaign, under the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls.

The little coverage that it did receive was short lived, and in some ways disrespectful. The French satire magazine, Charlie Hebdo, even depicted the kidnapped girls as pregnant, Black and Muslim Welfare Queens. The cartoon ignores the fact that the kidnapped girls were kidnapped from a Christian school and are most likely Christian themselves. It also belittles the fact that the girls are being forced into marriages and are victims of sexual assault. Instead, the cartoon relies on racist tropes for the sake of “satire” (satire being in quotes because comedy at the expense of the oppressed isn’t satirical and rarely funny).

Last week, 8 months after the kidnapping of the Chibok girls, a shooting occurred at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, and 12 people were killed. The media was quicker to pick up on this story and the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie rapidly became a trending topic all over the world, almost drowning out the news that Boko Haram massacred as many as 2000 people and razed 16 villages in a 5-day span the same week as the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Human Rights Watch satellite analysis of Doro Gowon. (Credit: Human Rights Watch)

Above: Human Rights Watch satellite analysis of Doro Gowon, Borno state, Nigeria, one of the towns attacked by Boko Haram this month. 57% of the town is estimated to have been burned down based on this image. Click for full image and article in a new window. (Credit: Human Rights Watch)

The instant support of Charlie Hebdo and the struggle for support for the Chibok girls says a lot about the narrative that the US and European media wants to compose when it comes to which victims are worthy of sympathy. Despite the offensive cartoon drawn about the Chibok girls by the Charlie Hebdo magazine, and the offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – which is the reason why Charlie Hebdo was specifically targeted by the extremists – it seems as if the magazine has been pushed into almost martyr status.

Marches and rallies are happening all over Europe in solidarity with the magazine, while attacks on Mosques in France are being ignored. Cartoonists have even gone so far as to create the hashtag #CartoonistLivesMatter as an attempt to express the importance of their freedom of speech.

There are hundreds of schoolgirls missing, for most of the past year. Thousands have been displaced in just the past two weeks, with possibly thousands more killed. There are entire generations of families murdered in Northern Nigeria.
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2,000 “feared dead” in raids by Boko Haram in NE Nigeria

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Last weekend, I posted a story on Boko Haram’s rout of a multi-national force and capture of a Nigerian base in the country’s northeast:

Nigeria’s strategically significant military base at Baga, near the border of Chad, fell to Boko Haram in a clear rout for the multi-national force stationed there, who apparently put up no resistance.

 
Some residents, who escaped the fall of the town and fled across Lake Chad and the national border, had reported at the time that Boko Haram had set the town of Baga on fire and was killing people indiscriminately. (Baga was previously also the site of a massacre by government counter-insurgency forces in 2013.)

The reports filtering out since then, about what happened next, are even more grim:

Boko Haram razed at least 16 villages in northern Nigeria, leaving 2,000 people unaccounted for and feared dead since Monday, Nigerian officials said Thursday.

It’s possible some of the missing are in hiding or are outside the country and uncounted (about 2,500 refugees crossed the border this week), but things look bleak on that possibility:

Borno state lawmaker Ahmed Khalifa told NBC News that “towns are just gone” and that the the villages along Lake Chad are “covered in bodies.” The village attacks reportedly began after militants seized a key military base and chased residents out of the area. After clearing the villages, they returned to kill survivors and burn down town structures.

 
TIME magazine reports this alarming development:

Boko Haram […] controls an estimated 30-35,000 square kilometers, roughly the same amount of terrain as Syria and Iraq’s Islamic State.

 
It’s pretty telling about U.S. priorities, over-reactions, and under-reactions in different parts of the world that the response to ISIS last year was sharply different — which is to say, not even on the same scale of magnitude — from the response to Boko Haram, even as they now control the same land area by size.

Mass executions by ISIS in Syria and Iraq have so far reportedly topped out at 700 people in a two week killing spree (although the total figures across incidents over the past year are significantly higher). If the civilian body count estimates coming out of north Borno state in northeast Nigeria prove correct, Boko Haram will have already significantly exceeded the August 2014 massacres by ISIS.

Keep in mind, however, that public official/government reports on the insurgency in Nigeria have often proven greatly exaggerated or altogether false, and information coming out of the Baga area is likely to be very sketchy at best right now. At minimum, though, the intensity and frequency of Boko Haram’s attacks on military and civilian targets (especially near the border regions) appear to be picking up steam.

Added January 9 at 7:33 PM ET: — Report from Amnesty International via the AP:

Hundreds of bodies — too many to count — remain strewn in the bush in Nigeria from an Islamic extremist attack that Amnesty International suggested Friday is the “deadliest massacre” in the history of Boko Haram.
[…]
District head Baba Abba Hassan said most victims are children, women and elderly people who could not run fast enough when insurgents drove into Baga, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles on town residents.

“The human carnage perpetrated by Boko Haram terrorists in Baga was enormous,” Muhammad Abba Gava, a spokesman for poorly armed civilians in a defense group that fights Boko Haram, told The Associated Press.

He said the civilian [self-defense] fighters gave up on trying to count all the bodies. “No one could attend to the corpses and even the seriously injured ones who may have died by now,” Gava said.

 

Also: The BBC reports that nearby Niger’s troops will no longer be participating in the multi-national force in Borno state due to the deteriorating security situation (which seems a bit counter-intuitive since they’re supposed to be helping with that exact problem):

Soldiers from Niger had been there [at Baga base] but were not present when it was attacked.

Niger Foreign Minister Mohamed Bazoum told the BBC Hausa service: “We have 50 soldiers there and decided to withdraw them after Boko Haram captured Malamfatori town in October and continued to operate in the area with impunity.

“As you know, Baga is under [the control of] Boko Haram terrorists and unless the town is recaptured from them, we will not send back our troops.

 

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Boko Haram routs multi-national force, seizes Nigerian base

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Just days after Cameroon had to scramble planes to repulse as many as a thousand Boko Haram fighters who had overrun the Achigachia military base and five border villages in Cameroon, Nigeria’s strategically significant military base at Baga, near the border of Chad, fell to Boko Haram in a clear rout for the multi-national force stationed there, who apparently put up no resistance:

A senator in Borno state said troops had abandoned the base in the town of Baga after it was attacked on Saturday. Residents of Baga, who fled by boat to neighbouring Chad, said many people had been killed and the town set ablaze.

Baga, scene of a Nigerian army massacre in 2013, was the last town in the Borno North area [one of three Senate districts in the state] under government control. It hosted the base of the Multi-National Joint Task Force (MNJTF), made up of troops from Nigeria, Chad and Niger.
[…]
Residents who fled to Chad said they had woken to heavy gunfire as militants stormed Baga early on Saturday, attacking from all directions. They said they had decided to flee when they saw the multi-national troops running away.
[…]
In April 2013, at least 37 people were killed and 2,275 homes destroyed in Baga by troops hunting Boko Haram fighters who had attacked a patrol, Human Rights Watch reported.

 
Cooperation between the armed forces of Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and other nearby countries has been extremely limited and there has not been much trust. This new failure, involving one of the few points of direct integration, is likely to reinforce that tension among the anti-Boko Haram alliance members. That in turn will make it harder to prevent Boko Haram from easily moving back and forth across national borders to stage attacks on the alliance.

Still image (via AFP) from the Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

Still image (via AFP) from a Boko Haram video communiqué received October 31, 2014.

NGO caught experimenting on Ebola patients in Sierra Leone

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The Al Jazeera headline above is misleading and would be way scarier if corrected: It’s not an “Ebola drug” being tested on Africans, it’s a completely unrelated drug (a heart medication) that some Italian NGO decided unilaterally also works against Ebola, even though it doesn’t and there’s no evidence to support that claim. British medics are saying that they think the use of this drug is actually killing more patients with Ebola, and the British government demanded that the Italians stop using it. It was also not approved for use by the local government.

As the Liberian author of the Al Jazeera piece says, abuses like this are exactly why locals don’t trust “Western medicine” in the first place. From the colonial era to — as she discusses — Tuskegee and Guatemala, or even to the more recent fake CIA vaccination program in Pakistan, there are simply a lot of good reasons for the poor and vulnerable populations of the world to fear medical “assistance” from Western governments and doctors. This disgusting abuse in Sierra Leone is only likely to worsen that fear, even as local medical facilities and staff have been completely overwhelmed and outsiders have become necessary to halt the outbreak.

Moreover, the author notes that Ebola has been around since 1975, so “urgency” is hardly a valid excuse to throw all the ethical rules of drug testing out the window.

Credit: Wikimedia

Credit: Wikimedia

Hope and concern over new East African gasfield discoveries

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Tanzania Daily News, December 30, 2014, “Tanzania, Mozambique Top Africa’s Oil, Gas Table“:

Africa’s energy industry could boom in the coming years, with Mozambique and Tanzania set to emerge as new frontiers if they can attract enough badly needed investment, a report said recently.

Six of the top 10 global discoveries in 2013 were made in Africa, with more than 500 companies now exploring across to the continent, according to a study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Large gas finds in Mozambique and Tanzania would make the world “take note of east Africa as an emerging player in the global industry,” said the report’s advisory leader, Chris Bredenhann.

The boom has brought investment opportunities, despite the lingering challenges of corruption, lack of infrastructure and regulation.

Transactions worth some $1 billion occurred every 17 days in Africa’s oil and sector last year, the report said. Still, the continent faces fierce competition for vital investment from other parts of the world, the PWC report cautioned.

 
As noted above, public theft of revenues remains a huge challenge if ordinary Africans are to receive any benefits from this expansion of the resource extraction industry — rather than simply being exploited once again. Moreover, it is always critical to avoid becoming economically and societally dependent on the export revenues of a single natural resource.

However, there are other challenges too. Gideon George, several days earlier in the Tanzania Daily News, had already published a piece warning Tanzanians not to get their hopes up for (or prematurely fear the effects of) big revenues and investments flooding the country, quite yet, because of the economics involved:

Reports from the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) show that gas deposits have now reached 50.4 trillion cubic feet (tcf), increasing anxiety among the population which now thinks Tanzania is on the way to becoming another ‘Dubai’.

Experts term this as ‘extremely high expectations of super earnings’ and no wonder the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) was so adamant that it set its eyes on the 26 PSAs that have been signed between the Government through the TPDC and the exploration companies.

Ask anyone on the prospects and the answer would be trillions of dollars in super earnings. However, according to oil and gas experts, the expected high earnings could remain a dream because of a number of factors including more gas discoveries being made elsewhere around the globe which could lower prices due to stiff competition.

These include discoveries in other countries of the region such as Mozambique which has proven reserves of gas amounting to 150 million tcf, discoveries from other continents discoveries from unconventional sources such as shale gas. Shale gas in the United States is rapidly increasing as an available source of natural gas.
[…]
“Discovering gas deposits is one thing and extracting them and selling them is quite another. You can have large deposits if cannot you to extract the gas or get markets to sell the gas the dream of super earnings would easily evaporate,” said a Denis Maringo Founding Director of the Oil, Natural Gas & Environmental Alliance (ONGEA), adding that “there is no need to be over ambitious.”

The view has been strengthened by a Dar es Salaam University Don, Dr. Alex Hepelwa who has asked Tanzania to tow a precautionary line over expected gas earnings, emphasizing the need to develop a strong internal market through increased use of gas for domestic and industrial purposes.

 
Simply put, the more unconventional fields discovered and opened around the world, the lower the wholesale oil and gas prices will fall due to competition, and some of the more difficult reserves (both technically and governmentally) to develop will continue to remain just out of reach.

As always, establishing transparent governance and enforcing the rule of law are prerequisites to any country or region receiving durable and useful foreign direct investment and benefiting from the arrival of new industries. They cannot come later. Such measures attract stable partnerships with good-faith actors and help ensure that the local population is not being played. They also promote sounder and broader-based long-term investment of national natural resource wealth into human development for the whole population.

A world free of land mines?

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From an Al Jazeera English report from Mozambique:

Progress in Mozambique and elsewhere indicates that a world without landmines could be achieved by 2025 […] 40 countries are expected to become mine-free within the next five years

 
https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/550305419630227457

Additional excerpt:

Meanwhile, with its snout on the ground, a dog is wiggling through the grass. When it comes to de-mining, dogs are indeed man’s best friend. Using their keen sense of smell to sniff out explosives in the ground, dogs are about 30 times faster than human de-miners, according to Alan Johnson, head of operations at Handicap International’s Mozambique operation.

Johnson said he has never seen a dog hurt in the de-mining process. “They smell everything long before the point they would step on it,” he noted, adding dogs’ weight distribution makes them less likely to trigger the mines.