Africa News blog

Nigeria’s leader fights propaganda war

Less than a month after launching his election campaign in a blaze of optimism, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has found himself fighting a potentially damaging propaganda war over last week’s car bombs.     Jonathan’s assertion that rebels from his Niger Delta home region were not responsible for the twin bomb attacks near an independence day parade last Friday has laid him open to a barrage of criticism from rivals who accuse him of partisanship.

    As the first head of state from the southern Niger Delta, Jonathan already faced a tough battle convincing some in the ruling party to back his election bid and jettison a gentleman’s agreement that means the next president should be a northerner.     The unwritten pact in the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is meant to prevent tribalism and regional rivalries becoming a factor in federal politics by ensuring power rotates every two terms between north and south.     Jonathan’s comments that the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), which claimed the blasts, was not responsible and suggestions from the authorities that associates of his main rival, former military ruler Ibrahim Babangida, may be involved have infuriated and united his northern opponents.     “The man … who only a few weeks ago moved us with lofty words of hope and a vision of transformation, shot himself in the foot and then put the bloody foot in his mouth,” wrote Tolu Ogunlesi, a journalist on Nigeria’s Next newspaper.     “The incident momentarily stripped him of his presidential garb and wrapped him in the gaudy garments of a tribal chieftain,” he said.     Babangida and three other northerners running against him in the primaries issued a joint statement slamming Jonathan for “exonerating” MEND and accusing him of using the bomb blasts as a pretext to intimidate his opponents.     A separate group of northern politicians led by ex-finance minister and founding PDP member Adamu Ciroma described it as a “rude shock to the nation” and called on Jonathan to resign.     Their fury was piqued by the brief detention of Babangida’s campaign director Raymond Dokpesi for questioning over the blasts by the secret service on Monday.     The presidency said the investigations were being carried out on the back of U.S. and British as well as Nigerian intelligence and that anybody could be invited for questioning.     “It is unfortunate that an unprecedented national tragedy of this nature has been politicised by people whose only interest is what they can get from the country and not what the country can get from them,” Jonathan said on his Facebook page.     “They specialise in playing one part of the country against the other and riding on sectional sentiments to promote their narrow ambitions,” he said.      Jonathan started his election campaign almost three weeks ago on a high, having unveiled plans to privatise the power sector and end chronic power shortages, better manage the country’s oil savings and fight criminality.     He pledged a new era of leadership “uncontaminated by the prejudices of the past” and his campaign team hoped the momentum would carry him into the primaries, originally due this month.     But the timetable was revised to allow the electoral authorities to overhaul voter lists, handing his northern rivals more time to steel themselves.     The bomb blasts were another blow to his strategy.     Beneath all the finger pointing and rhetoric, none of Nigeria’s political class emerge well from the episode.     Jonathan was vice president when Henry Okah, a senior militant figure charged in Johannesburg this week with conspiring to carry out the attacks, had treason and gun-running charges against him dropped under an amnesty deal.     Aliyu Gusau, another northern presidential candidate who has criticised Jonathan, was the country’s national security adviser until three weeks ago. Security experts say Friday’s attacks would have been months in the planning.     Babangida’s opponents say his assertion that Jonathan does not have a firm grip on national security is rich coming from a man largely remembered for his 1993 cancellation of an election generally regarded as fair which led to civil unrest and a bloody crackdown by the security forces.     “Politicians in Nigeria are very good at arguing with each other,” said Antony Goldman, a Nigeria expert and head of London-based PM Consulting.     “But the temptation to try to extract political advantage from a national emergency reveals the deeper issue that ten years after the end of military rule, the whole political class struggles to make itself relevant to the people.”     The propaganda war will rumble on and it is unclear what impact, if any, it will have on the candidates’ fortunes. But it bodes ill for any hopes that the elections will be based on real issues rather than scaremongering and personality clashes.     “The bomb blast is a shame because it could have been prevented, but you know in Nigeria we don’t pay attention to the things that really matter,” said Kehinde Osho, 24, a graphic artist in the commercial hub Lagos.     “Elections are next year and the voters are not even registered yet. We are fighting a lost battle — we won’t have a credible election with this kind of preparation.”

Can’t do or won’t do? Ending Darfur’s kidnap business

Kidnapping foreign workers in Sudan for ransom has become a dangerous business in Darfur in the past year with 10 separate cases and at least 22 expatriate victims.

These are not the al Qaeda kidnaps of West Africa. The Darfuri criminals have so far demanded only money and have not killed any of their victims. Some have threatened to sell their captives to al Qaeda-linked groups if they do not get paid.

The abductions have restricted the operations of those aid and U.N. agencies still working in Darfur, with foreigners mostly relocated to the main towns and rarely travelling into the rural areas where people are most in need of help.

But the question always debated by Sudan watchers is: “Is it that Khartoum can’t protect foreign workers in Darfur or that it won’t?”

Many point to the timing as an indication — these abductions became a regular occurrence after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir in March 2009.

Others speculate that the government, which has long had a hostile attitude to the international humanitarian agencies in Darfur, does not want them to get out and report on the worsening situation in the rural areas.

France’s former colonies, 50 years on

 Over the last week, a string of African nations have been busy celebrating 50 years of independence from France. Almost inevitably, the prickly relationship between Paris and her former colonies has come under the microscope.

Under President Omar Bongo, Gabon represented the clearest example of Francafrique – the intertwined political and economic interests of the French government and the elite in former African colonies.

But, under Bongo’s son, Ali, Libreville has been sending out a different message and on the eve of Gabon’s independence celebrations this week, Bongo junior announced $4.5 billion in business deals with Indian and Singaporean firms.

Bongo son, whose Anglophile tendencies are underscored by his U.S. university education and his decision to send his son to school at the prestigious British public school, Eton, followed this up with an announcement that Gabon would no longer be bound by exclusive ties with France.

Nightmare start for Africa’s year of soccer

    Africa’s year of soccer scarcely could have got off to a worse start.

    Days before the start of the African Nations Cup — a warm-up for the continent’s first World Cup in South Africa this June — the gun attack on Togo’s national team by separatists in Angola for many will confirm Africa’s reputation for chaos.

    The ambush of the team bus as it wound its way through the restive enclave of Cabinda left the driver dead, nine wounded and a huge question mark over whether the tournament can proceed – despite host Angola’s pledges to heighten security.

    Sceptics of Africa’s ability to pull off major events of this kind will be saying “I told you so”.

    Was it really a good idea to schedule six group matches and a quarter-final in a region where separatist factions have waged a three-decade-long war?

    Why did the Togolese team choose to make its way through the area from its training ground in neighbouring Republic of Congo by coach, despite an apparent ban on bus travel?

    Tournament organisers have vowed that the competition would continue as planned, but with the rebel group behind the attack promising it was “just the start” of a campaign of violence it may not be the end of the story.

Sweet potatoes to beat climate change?

A major obstacle to producing enough food has been the dry weather which hit many African countries last year, including Kenya, where 10 million people urgently needed food when rains failed. Now Kenyan farmers have been asked to grow drought tolerant crops to help prepare for the effects of climate change.

Nancy Opele has been growing sweet potatoes on her farm in Kenya’s western Trans Nzoia district. She started growing the potatoes in 2003 after researchers approached farmers and introduced them to the crop.

“We have discovered that these potatoes just need a small place to grow and they do very well. You harvest a lot of potatoes, Opele told Reuters Africa Journal.

Nancy is part of a group of women in the Bahaso self help group who are planting alternative crops to Kenya’s staple food, maize. Sweet potatoes do well in the region, are hardly attacked by pests and need minimal rainfall to grow. The crop also takes about 5 months to mature, half the time needed by maize.

 Sweet potatoes can be stored in the soil for up to 8 months but once harvested they don’t stay fresh for long. Nancy and her friends usually preserve the potatoes by grating them and drying the flakes out in the sun. The flakes are then ground into flour.

The potatoes are gaining popularity after four failed rain seasons led to a drought last year. Experts say it was the worst seen in the country since 1996. Many farmers lost their maize crop but the sweet potatoes did well.

One way to build food security is to promote use of drought tolerant foods like sweet potatoes. The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, or KARI, is training farmers to plant improved varieties of the crop.

Soccer match creates Arab diplomatic rift

Bringing aid and being a target

Posted by George Fominyen, AlertNet‘s humanitarian affairs correspondent for West and Central Africa, based in Dakar. He is also West Africa coordinator for Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Emergency Information Service.

The abduction of two Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) workers in Chad this month after a robbery at their compound near Sudan’s Darfur region has again brought to the fore the question of attacks on aid workers.

Aid workers in Chad told me assaults on compounds and car-jacking on the roads happen every week and that armed bandits are their biggest worry. But Chad is not unique. There have been at least 16 reported attacks on humanitarian workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo between January and June this year, according to statistics from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Fifteen of these attacks involved guns and in one case the attackers took hostages.

Worldwide, 260 humanitarian aid workers were killed, kidnapped or seriously injured in 2008, the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) reported in a policy brief. This toll is the highest in 12 years and has spiked in the past three years, the study said.

But why are aid workers targets? They are supposed to be helping people.

“Humanitarian workers are seen as rich people in places where most of the population is poor,” said Philippe Adapoe, the country director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Chad.

from Global News Journal:

Saviors or conquerors? UN mulls “responsibility to protect”

By Patrick Worsnip      What's more important -- the right of a sovereign state to manage its affairs free of outside interference or the duty of the international community to intervene when massive human rights violations are being committed in a country?   The United Nations -- nothing if not a talking shop -- has been debating that question this week in the General Assembly. It goes to the heart of what the U.N. is all about.   At issue is a declaration issued four years ago by a summit of more than 150 world leaders asserting the "responsibility to protect" -- R2P in U.N. jargon -- populations threatened with genocide or other mass atrocities. It was a somewhat belated response to widespread criticism of the United Nations for failing to stop massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s.      The carefully crafted declaration said the responsibility began with the government of the country concerned. If that failed, it foresaw a sliding scale of international action, ranging from advice through mediation to -- in a last resort -- intervention by force. And such a use of force could only be authorized by the Security Council, meaning the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China would all have to agree.   Cautious as it was, the summit document was seen by many advocacy groups as a step on the road to fulfilling their dream that if a government was committing atrocities against its people, the United Nations would march in and stop it.   In the real world, U.N. officials say, that is not going to happen, at least under the peacekeeping rules that have applied in recent decades. These do not authorize U.N. forces to go to war against the national army of a sovereign state -- a move that would amount to invasion. Witness the six-year-old conflict in Sudan's western region of Darfur -- branded by some as genocide -- where a U.N./African Union peacekeeping force is only now being slowly deployed with the consent of the Khartoum government. The only time that R2P has been invoked in practice -- and even then retrospectively -- was in former U.N. secretary-General Kofi Annan's mission to mediate in post-election violence in Kenya last year, U.N. officials say.   This week's debate was to take stock of R2P and discuss how to take it forward, although no immediate action is expected. It came against the background of a determined attempt by radicals led by General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto, a former Nicaraguan Sandinista government minister, to kick the issue into the long grass.

For D'Escoto and those who agree with him, R2P is code for an attempt by big Western powers to impose their will on the weak. In a contentious "concept note" issued to all U.N. members he declared that "colonialism and interventionism used 'responsibility to protect' arguments." One member of a panel of experts D'Escoto convened to launch the debate, U.S. academic Noam Chomsky, said R2P-type arguments had been used to justify Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria and Nazi Germany's pre-World War Two move into Czechoslovakia.   While some radical states, such as Venezuela, echoed D'Escoto's line in the assembly debate, human rights groups expressed relief that most cautiously supported a strictly defined interpretation of R2P and backed proposals by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for developing it. Ban has proposed periodic reviews of how countries have implemented R2P and regular reports by himself on the issue. "To those that argued this week that the U.N. was not ready to make a reality of the commitment to end mass atrocities, the majority of the General Assembly gave its answer: you are wrong," said Monica  Serrano of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. Despite that, there have been clear signs of concern among developing countries that unless tightly controlled, R2P could be used in support of future Iraq-style invasions of countries that have angered the big powers.   What's your view?

Overdose of trouble in West Africa

That political stability is vital for investment and development goes without saying, but it seems as though too much instability can be bad for criminal enterprises too.

The cocaine cartels that used West Africa, and Guinea-Bissau in particular, as a conduit to Europe were long accused of worsening the chaos in one of the region’s poorest and most troubled states by buying off some factions of the security forces and political leaders.

But if so, things may have gone too far.

In less than a year, Guinea-Bissau has lost President Joao Bernardo “Nino” Vieira (dead), the head of the army (dead), the head of the navy (fled), a former defence minister (dead) and a candidate to replace the slain president in the June 28 election (dead). And those are just some of the figures at the top.

Whichever of Guinea-Bissau’s leaders might have been involved in the drugs trade and which were trying to fight it, the removal of such a swathe of the leadership appears for now at least to have knocked the traffickers off balance too.

Drug smuggling through West Africa has plummeted, according to the U.N., despite the fact that its geography also makes it an ideal bridge between Latin America and Europe.

“The fact that big traffickers do not any longer have certain partners in power clearly have disrupted the routes,” said Antonio Mazzitelli, regional head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “A trafficker would never bring 2 tonnes of drugs to a country where he is not sure he can operate,” he told Reuters.

from Environment Forum:

New ‘gold rush’ buzz hits Germany over Sahara solar

A "gold-rush-like" buzz has spread across Germany in the last week over tentative plans to invest the staggering sum of 400 billion euros to harvest solar power in the Sahara for energy users across Europe and northern Africa. Even though European and Mediterranean Union leaders have been exploring and studying for several years the idea of using concentrated solar power (CSP), the Desertec proposition suddenly captivated the public's attention a week ago when German reinsurer Munich Re announced it had invited blue chip German companies such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens and several major utilities to a July 13 meeting on the project. The 20 companies aim to sign a memorandum of understanding to found the Desertec Industrial Initiative that could be supplying 15 percent of Europe's electricity in the decades ahead.

Germany's deputy foreign minister, Guenter Gloser, has been the government's point man for the project. I had the chance to talk to him about it.

Question: How did this project to turn the sun in the Sahara into electricity for Europe and north African countries get started? Guenter Gloser: About 15 months ago Germany and France proposed including the solar plan into the list of projects for the Union for the Mediterranean. There were institutions that had already done research and we thought: 'Why don't we use this sun belt where there is such an abundance of sunshine as a source of renewable energy?' Together Germany, France and Egypt put forth this solar plan as one of the six projects for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and underscored the fact that it could benefit both sides. It was not an idea where just countries north of the Mediterranean will benefit but rather those countries south of it as well as across the EU would also benefit.

Question: What is the current status of the project? Gloser: We agreed to move forward with the project and want to go forward step-by-step towards its implementation. But obviously neither the EU nor the Arab League will be the principal players but rather private investors. Our task for this project is to create the political framework -- for example with setting up of the feed-in tariffs, ensuring the infrastructure is built and ensuring that the renewable energy can be transported to Europe. The political framework can also make it possible to expedite the approvals process. But what is also very important is that the energy produced is also available for countries in the region. For example, Morocco can take advantage of its solar and wind conditions on the Atlantic coast to build solar power plants or wind energy parks to provide energy for its domestic market and to sell energy abroad as well. Even countries such as Algeria, which has fossil fuel reserves, could also use the sun belt for solar thermal power for some of their energy needs -- and prolong their fossil fuel reserves.

Question: Is there not risk involved in such large-scale investment in a region with a potential for political instability? Gloser: It's a cooperation that will contribute towards diversifying energy sources, geographically and in terms of energy sources. It's a truly fascinating project because it's a win-win for everyone. And the third winner will be the people and institutions that finance this project. Neither the EU nor the countries in the south are capable of financing this on their own. So the question is: can third-parties bringing financing be involved. Energy security is an important issue everywhere. There are energy sources we have today that at times have been somewhat at risk. There's no contradiction in saying that it's important to diversify a country's energy source as well as diversifying the types of energy it receives. It's not that there is no risk whatsoever but it's important to keep in mind that there are also some risk factors for other sources of energy that we are now importing.

Question: What impact do you think a project like this could have in the Mediterranean Union? Gloser: I think the partnership approach that we have taken could well have a positive influence of stability for the countries taking part as well as the neighbouring nations. The EU has been enlarged and come closer together in the past decades but there hasn't been as much of that among Arab countries. Perhaps it would be possible through certain projects, such as this solar energy project or water projects or transportation routes, to increase the cooperation among those countries.

Question: There have been fears expressed that Europe would be exploiting natural resources in Africa, raising fears of a new sort of 'colonisation'. What would you say to those fears? Gloser: It is not in any way an issue of the north dominating the south. It is not only the north that is interested in acquiring renewable energy but rather other users are interested. And if that mutual need for energy leads to a project that satisfies all sides then that is in my view a good route to take. I don't think there's any justification for the notion of this being an 'energy colonisation' or anything like that at all. It's a mutually beneficial project."