Category: Africa

By Devendra Kamarajan

ADDIS ABABA (IDN) – For quite some time, Africa has been hosting at least three-quarters of the UN Peacekeepers worldwide which South African President Theo Mbeki and Algerian UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi bemoan as “a sad fact”.

In preface to the landmark report titled ‘African Politics, African Peace’, the two African leaders stress that having “engaged in a successful struggle against colonialism and apartheid . . . we surely have an obligation to exercise our hard-won right to self-determination and independence effectively to address this humiliating reality of persistent conflict on our Continent and the unwelcome and painful consequences it has imposed on the masses of Africa.”

HARARE (IDN | GIN) – With exports down and scarce dollars hidden away under pillows, banks in Zimbabwe are running out of legal tender. At the same time, some ATMs have been shuttered, leaving minimum wage workers, normally paid in cash, with IOUs as employers struggle to withdraw notes.

“We’re importing more than we’re exporting and we can’t print money because we use mainly the U.S. dollar,” explained Sam Malaba, CEO of the Agricultural Bank of Zimbabwe.

In May 2016, in a bid to relieve the cash shortage, Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe governor John Mangudya announced the printing of “bond notes” – usable within the country but worthless outside – to begin circulating in October. However, the new currency is widely rejected as “monopoly money” by the population.

NEW YORK | HARARE (IDN | GIN) – Zimbabwe‘s former vice president, Joice Mujuru, was the headliner at a rally in Matabeleland in one of the first public events of the new Zimbabwe People First (ZimPF) opposition party. The newly-launched campaign promptly took on the incumbent – President Robert Mugabe – in advance of elections in 2018.

Mujuru accused the government of being disinterested in the plight of the majority and promised to fight for the interests of ordinary citizens. “Zimbabwe People First is a new democratic, inclusive political party that accommodates every Zimbabwean… Please, get it from me, I am not going back to Zanu PF”.

By GIN and INPS Africa Correspondent

NEW YORK | LUANDA (IDN) – President José Eduardo dos Santos, who has ruled oil-rich Angola for the last 37 years, has found a new and lucrative job for his daughter, Isabel dos Santos, ranked Africa’s richest woman by Forbes magazine.

President dos Santos, 73, tapped his daughter this month (June 2016) to head Sonangol, a parastatal that oversees petroleum and natural gas production in Angola. Using a presidential decree, he sacked the company’s directors, in a move some have called unconstitutional.

By GIN and INPS Africa Correspondent

NEW YORK | ACCRA (IDN) – Ghanaians who use social media could find themselves staring at a blank screen instead of Facebook or Twitter under a plan now being considered by Ghana’s Police Service (GPS).

Superintendent Cephas Arthur, Public Affairs director of the GPS, said that blocking Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets during the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections would be in the best interests of the nation. Such a ban would not infringe on people’s rights, he said, but would promote peace and ensure a violence-free election, he claimed.

Analysis by Reinhardt Jacobsen *

BRUSSELS (IDN) – While UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has urged both Ethiopia and Eritrea to exercise “maximum restraint and refrain from any act or statement that could exacerbate the situation”, reports gathered by IDN from several independent sources close to the border between the two countries and in Eritrea, underscore the grave risks the armed conflict between the two East African countries entails.

Diverse sources claim that border skirmishes are ongoing unabated and that “war logic” is gripping both sides – with Eritrean and Ethiopian leaders putting on their “war masks”.

NEW YORK (IDN | GIN) – Over a four-month period, complex and unsuitable trades made by Goldman Sachs bankers ate up nearly the entire investment of a Libyan sovereign-wealth fund – an amount Libya is suing to recoup, according to a case now before a UK High Court.

The fund, set up under the regime of the then Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, was intended to invest the country’s oil wealth just as sanctions against it were being lifted. Due to the fund’s limited experience with so-called “jumbo and elephant trades”, unwise trades nearly bankrupted the fund.

Goldman Sachs, on the other hand, reaped huge profits from only nine trades – including one larger than the bank had undertaken in a single stock – earning more than $200 million for the company, it was alleged.

NEW YORK (IDN | GIN) – The nephew of Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, threatened with the loss of his government scholarship over a pro-LGBT Facebook post, has been granted asylum in the U.S., local media reports.

Alagie Jammeh confirmed the story to the Washington Blade, an LGBT news source, in a telephone interview. Jammeh, who is due to graduate next week from the University of California, Santa Barbara, told the Blade that he wrote the post after he became friends with a gay man.

Alagie Jammeh had learned on May 17 – the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia – that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had recommended him for approval. He told the Blade that his lawyer called him two days later and said his asylum request had been granted after passing a background check.

NEW YORK (IDN | GIN) – The outlines of the Rwandan genocide are known by many. The time it took place (April to July 1994), the troubling silence of the international community, the number of those brutally murdered (as many as 800,000 mostly of the Tutsi minority and some Hutus) and the ever-debated questions – what could turn a people against their neighbour with a cruelty that was both devastating and inhumane?

NEW YORK (IDN | GIN) – Cancellation of the scheduled appointments of President Muhammadu Buhari and the arrangement of a 10 day trip to England for treatment of an ear infection have raised concerns that a serious health issue is afflicting the recently-elected leader.

Though it would not be the first time a Nigerian president claimed to be receiving treatment abroad but was actually at an advanced stage of a serious illness. In 2010, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was reportedly receiving treatment in Saudi Arabia for a long-standing kidney ailment when in fact he was near death and died quickly upon his return.