Africa News blog

PHOTOBLOG: Children in Kenya and Haiti forced to grow up fast, if they survive

I had a flashback the other day when I was looking at photographs from Haiti of 15-year-old Fabianne Geismar, shot dead in the head after stealing wall hangings from a Port-au-Prince store, crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The image of Fabianne sprawled on the ground, blood trailing over the paintings she’d grabbed, took me back to my own childhood in Nairobi and the sight of a 7- or 8-year-old-boy – probably the same age as me at the time – who was caught stealing sweets from a street vendor and was beaten and burnt with rubber tyres. They called it mob justice.

To this day, I’ll never understand why that poor boy had to die such a violent and senseless death for something so trivial. I feel the same way about Fabianne – she survived one of the most catastrophic events in living memory, only to be shot in the head for petty theft. And for stealing wall hangings where there are no walls.

Fabianne’s childhood was brutally stolen from her and it got me thinking about how quickly so many young people in places like Africa, Asia and the Americas have to grow up, forced to fend for themselves through child labour or prostitution, denied an education and exposed to violence, disease and hunger at an age when they should be learning and playing.

Of the 2.2 billion children in the world, 1 billion live in poverty and experience violence annually, UNICEF figures show, meaning nearly half the children in the world don’t get to have childhoods. There are also an estimated 132 million orphans in the world, UNICEF says.

Children under 18 make up almost half of Haiti’s 9-million population and the country faces the highest rates of infant and child mortality in the Western hemisphere.

Officials fear thousands of children have been separated from their parents, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by child traffickers, being illegally adopted by other countries or forced into child labour in order to survive. Around 150 million children worldwide aged 5–14 are engaged in child labour.

Does the “billionth African” mean boon or burden?

Aid – a new model?

Is Obama Africa’s saviour?

Africa is rich in natural resources like oil, gold, diamonds, platinum and yet millions of African people live in abject poverty. The global economic and climate crisis have made life even harder.

At the recent G8 meeting in Italy, African leaders and members of civil society voiced concerns over the promises made in previous G8 meetings of aid and assistance that have yet to materialise.

Nigeria: Ten years of civilian rule

Nigeria marks its first 10 years of unbroken civilian rule on Friday after emerging from nearly three decades of uninterrupted military dictatorship on May 29, 1999.

The political elite in Africa’s top oil producer are rolling out the drums to celebrate the milestone.  And why not?

Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military ruler who won elections in 1999, ended Nigeria’s pariah status and brought Africa’s most populous nation back into the international fold, helping secure an $18 billion debt write-off in 2005.

Will South Africa’s poor always back ANC?

It’s one of the biggest ironies in South African politics — the most loyal ANC voters are often those the party appears to have let down most bitterly.

For millions of poor, mostly black South Africans, life has barely changed since the African National Congress defeated apartheid under Nelson Mandela in 1994.

Year after year, they wait for the new house, the job, the running water and electricity, the decent education for their children that the ANC has promised. For many, that never comes. Yet most will still vote for ANC and its leader Jacob Zuma in an election next week.

The poorest residents of Munsieville, a township on the edge of Johannesburg, illustrate the contradiction.

Unemployed and tired of living crammed into one-room shacks with no running water or electricity, they are quick to list the ways their government has failed them.

Hundreds share one water tap, which sits next to a stinking mound of rubbish where dirt-smudged children play and stray dogs scavenge for food. They dig pits for toilets.

Many say they have languished for years at the bottom of waiting lists for decent housing. They were left behind while others enjoyed a decade of continuous economic growth that created a burgeoning black middle class.

G20. How did Africa do?

Before the G20 meeting, there was a lot of talk inside and outside Africa about making sure the continent did not get left out while the world’s richest and most powerful set out plans to save their own economies.******So how did Africa fare?******On the face of things, perhaps not too badly.******“Our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard-working families, not just in developed countries but in emerging markets and the poorest countries of the world too,” the communique says in paragraph 3.******In concrete terms:******• Resources available to the IMF will be trebled to $750 billion.***•  There will be support for a new allocation of Special Drawing Rights of $250 billion – something that could help poor countries***• There will be support for $100 billion more lending by Multilateral Development Banks (those include the World Bank Group and the African Development Bank)***• There will be $250 billion support for trade finance.***• Use will be made of resources from IMF gold sales “for concessional finance for the poorest countries”.***• Global financial institutions will be strengthened and reformed, ensuring that emerging and developing economies, including the poorest, must have greater voice and representation.”******The point on the gold sales was something for which Africa, represented at the summit by Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, had made a particular push.******But not all appeared so impressed. In East Africa based Business Daily, Allan Odhiambo’s piece was headlined “Africa thrown to back burner at G20 meeting.”******According to Nigeria’s ThisDay newspaper, President Umaru Yar’Adua’s main lament was the fact that Africa’s most populous country was not there (South Africa, with the continent’s biggest economy, was represented).******South Africa’s President Kgalema Motlanthe was quoted as saying he was “quite pleased” with the results of the summit.******How well do you think the G20 did for Africa? Will Africa really have a bigger say over the global financial system in future? Will that help?

The promised land?

Several hundred Africans have drowned off the coast of Libya in an attempt to escape to a better life in Europe.

The head of the United Nations refugee agency says the tragedy marks a grim start to what he calls the “smuggling season”, when the weather gets better and the perilous sea voyages pick up again after the winter.

But this smuggling season may be less promising than the last for the thousands of poverty-stricken Africans who arrive at their continent’s shores for the last leg of their journey by rickety boat to Europe.

Recession in Europe has brought with it rising unemployment and perhaps increasing resentment of foreigners taking jobs that the locals might now want to do. There are now 2.2 million more unemployed people in the European Union than a year ago, according to the latest EU figures.

It was hard enough for the African vendors of handbags and CDs on the streets of Europe at the best of times. How will it be at the worst of times?

At last: a positive look at Africa on U.S. TV

American television audiences were treated on Sunday night for the first time to the show “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency”, which is based on the best-selling series of novels set in Botswana by Alexander McCall Smith.

The series, being aired in the United States by HBO, has already been broadcast by the BBC in Britain. Like the novels, it follows the light-hearted adventures of Precious Ramotswe as she seeks to solve mysteries with her keen intuition and big heart.

My colleague Rebekah Kebede did an advance story on the U.S. premier which you can read here.

I have read most of the novels, and the TV premier seems to stick to the spirit of the books. African problems, such as AIDS or the use of body parts from kidnapped children to make traditional medicine, or “muti,” are not swept under the carpet. But many of the tales woven by McCall Smith are uplifting or deal with profound ethical dilemmas that his intrepid lady detective always resolves.

And it takes place in Botswana, a sparsely-populated land of great beauty and spectacular wilderness — I’ve seen elephant herds crossing the highway there — long regarded as a beacon of good governance and democracy in Africa.

It provides a pleasant change from the entertainment industry’s often negative portrayal of Africa. For example, the current season of the Fox thriller “24″ features terrorists from a genocidal African state taking over the White House and threatening the U.S. president.

Does Africa respect its writers enough?

The reception would have done justice to royalty or a movie star when Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe paid a rare visit to his homeland recently, some 50 years after penning his book “Things Fall Apart”.

That book has a firm place on school syllabuses in much of Africa and is studied around the world. Achebe, now 79, has been acclaimed as the father of modern African literature and as the continent’s greatest living writer – his books being very accessible as well as giving a penetrating insight into the struggles of his people.

Achebe’s Igbo community in southeastern Nigeria wanted to mark his homecoming in style and Reuters Television’s Africa Journal programme was there to follow it.

Achebe delighted people with readings from his classic novel, which has sold more than 10 million copies and tells the story of Okonkwo, who finds himself and his traditions pitted against newly arrived British colonialists in the 19th century.

“Knowing that Chinua Achebe with his talent unsurpassed, in the literary world as far as I am concerned, certainly in Nigeria, unsurpassed certainly in Africa, knowing that he comes from my neck of the woods is actually an inspiration to me,” said musician Onyeka Owenu.

The region has a reputation for producing internationally acclaimed writers, including Ben Okri and more recently Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the prize winning novel Half of a Yellow Sun.