Africa News blog

Nile River row: Could it turn violent?

The giggles started when the seventh journalist in a row said that his question was for Egypt’s water and irrigation minister, Mohamed Nasreddin Allam.

The non-Egyptian media gave him a bit of a hammering at last week’s talks in Addis Ababa for the nine countries that the Nile passes through.

Allam bared his teeth when a Kenyan journalist accused him of hiding behind “colonial-era treaties” giving his country the brunt of the river’s vital waters whether that hurt the poorer upstream countries or not.

“You obviously don’t know enough about this subject to be asking questions about it,” he snapped before later apologising to her with a kiss on the cheek.

Five of the nine Nile countries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Kenya — last month signed a deal to share the water that is a crucial resource for all of them. But Egypt and Sudan, who are entitled to most of the water and can veto upstream dams under a 1929 British-brokered agreement, refused.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi have not signed yet either and analysts are divided on whether they will or not. Six Nile countries must sign the agreement for it to have any power but Egypt says even that wouldn’t change its mind. The five signatories — some of the world’s poorest countries — have left the agreement open for debating and possible signing for up to a year.

Will EAC’s common market deal work?

For telecoms-tycoon-turned-philanthropist Mo Ibrahim, it’s one step forward, two steps back. For Benno Ndullu, governor of the central Bank of Tanzania, the whole thing is bound to stall unless problems are ironed out first.

For many Tanzanians, it’s a threat to their jobs, language and prospects.

But for the leaders of the five-member East African Community (EAC), signing the common market protocol on Friday represents the future fortunes of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda combined.

Signing the document — the culmination of a relatively speedy 18 months of negotiation — will mean goods, services and the community’s 126 million people can move freely across their borders, in theory at least.

Together, the five countries muster $60 billion in gross domestic product combined, and believe they can prosper better as one unit than apart.

Already they have a customs union, but by 2012 they foresee sharing a single currency and finally political federation.

A crackdown on Albino murders?

What’s the best way to fight malaria?

Nine out ten of malaria deaths occur in Africa – that’s nearly 1 million fatalities a year. The World Health Organisation estimates the financial loss to Africa because of malaria at 12 billion dollars a year.******And yet it’s an illness that’s preventable: the cheapest and easiest method is to stay under a mosquito net during the night.******In South Sudan, a mosquito net costs around $2, still too expensive for many here, where income per capita is just 25 cents per day. So the government and private charities have launched a campaign to distribute 75 million dollars’ worth of nets to 6 million people in the south before the rains start in July. With only 14 km of paved roads in the entire region, it won’t be easy.****** (more…)

East African albinos fear witchcraft murders

In Burundi, 11 albinos have been killed since last year.  In Tanzania, over 40 have been killed since mid-2007 by people who use their body parts, including hair, limbs and genitals, for witchcraft.

Tanzania is currently holding a secret vote to try to identity those involved in the murders and the trade in body parts. It has also banned traditional healers in an effort to curb the killings.

It is not clear why there has been such an upsurge in murders although Tanzania’s government and albino groups blame people involved in fishing and small-scale mining, an industry that has been booming.

The graves of albinos had long been plundered for the gruesome trade, leading to them being filled with concrete to prevent robbery. The killings are more recent.

Burundi has arrested at least eight people who were found with human bones, saying the killings are being carried out at the behest of people in neighbouring Tanzania. In Tanzania, at least 90 people – including four police officers – have been arrested on suspicion of killing albinos.

Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete has called the killings stupid and superstitious, but some people clearly believe that using the parts of the murdered albinos will help them to achieve success.

Even if the murders can be stopped, how can such beliefs be challenged?

Is East Africa ready for oil?

Buoyed by recent discoveries of commercial scale oil deposits in Uganda, east African policy makers, foreign oil explorers and their local partners trooped to a five-star hotel on the Kenyan coast this week to reflect on the progress and chart future strategies.Viewed as a frontier region for oil exploration, east Africa’s first major oil find was made by Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil companies in the Albertine Basin, which spans the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (whose improving relations are making the exploitation of the reserves look morel ikely).Before that, Tanzania had found vast reserves of natural gas in Songo Songo and Mnazi Bay areas.Just like Rwanda, which hopes to revolutionise electricity generation in the region through methane gas from Lake Kivu, Tanzania hopes to power cars from the gas and generate much needed electricity from its natural gas.The regional economic power house Kenya has, however, had disappointing results so far in its search for oil.Although 32 wells have been sunk here since the 1950s, only traces of oil and gas have been found. It is now reprocessing data gathered over that period in the hope new knowledge and technology will reveal hidden deposits.Drilling, an expensive affair that prospectors say can cost a firm $200 million for one well, took a commercial break in the 1980s. But it has also seen a resurgence of interest, thanks to last year’s rise of crude in global markets.Kenya issued 14 exploration licenses last year and China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) is set to sink its first well in the second half of this year in the eastern province.Kiraitu Murungi, the nation’s energy minister, told the meeting in Mombasa they were praying day and night for the new well and data reprocessing to show signs of oil.On the other hand,  Uganda — long reliant on Kenya’s ageing oil refinery for its supply of petroleum products — has grand plans for its newfound oil resources.They include the construction of a state of the art modern refinery at an estimated cost of $1.3 billion to process its oil as well as oil from any new finds in the region.Uganda’s energy and mineral development minister, Hillary Onek, spoke of the plans with a grin and added that the region, believed to share common geology, could be headed for a better future as it taps its oil and gas reserves to power development.However, as officials and oil prospectors retired to the hotel’s restaurants and beach bar for a drink in the evenings, they must have wondered if a few obstacles may not block the path to that prosperous future.The global financial crisis is weighing heavily on the finance base of some companies prospecting in the region.Lack of local skilled manpower in oil and gas industry is also worrying. So is the big question of how to equitably manage revenues from oil and gas so that oil and gas do not turn into a curse for the region as they have elsewhere on the continent.Is east Africa ready to handle oil and gas? Will oil discoveries help local communities?

Is Africa a good bet?

For those looking to invest in Africa, the best prospects are in Nigeria and Ethiopia according to a new index of potential investment destinations published this week.

But should anybody want to put money into Africa at a time the global financial crisis and falling prices for export commodities, on which the continent is so reliant, have discouraged investors who had begun to see some African countries as promising frontier markets?

“Africa is going to overtake the Middle East to become the second fastest growing region in the world after emerging Asia. It will be affected by the global financial crisis but it is much less exposed than many places,” Katharine Pulvermacher, chief executive of business consultancy African Rainbow said this week on the launch of its Star of Africa index.

The index’s creators told my colleague Peter Apps that potential growth in energy, water and communications consumption could amply reward investors taking the risk in Africa. South Africa, Mauritius and Tanzania took third, fourth and fifth place respectively on the index. Somalia, Chad and Eritrea were the least appealing countries for investors.

The International Monetary Fund’s most recent forecast of economic growth for Africa this year was 3.3 percent – much slower than the 5-6 percent of recent years but good by the standards of Western countries in recession. A senior IMF official noted recently, however, that African growth could be sharply lower than its forecasts.

“Remittances, tourism revenue and even aid, we feel could fall further,” said the IMF’s Africa Department Director Antoinette Sayeh.

The African markets that had attracted most foreign investment in recent years – not only developed South Africa but also countries such as Nigeria and Kenya – are among those that have so far been hardest hit, while smaller economies that may not have had so far to fall have been less touched.

Hu reassures Africa?

If anyone in Africa was worried that the global financial crisis might dim China’s interest in the continent, President Hu Jintao will be visiting this week to give some reassurances – as well as possibly to temper any unrealistic hopes for the amount of assistance to be expected.

As Chris Buckley reported from Beijing, this visit is also about China showing the wider world that it is a responsible power.

The fact that none of the countries Hu will visit is among Africa’s economic or resource heavyweights – Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius – is seen as a sign that China wants to send a message that its engagement with Africa is about much more than resources.

Trade between China and Africa rose to $107 billion last year and more deals are expected on this visit. Nearly all of Africa’s exports to China still come from a handful of countries rich in oil or minerals, though, and now the global downturn has put those in more doubt.

China’s involvement in Africa is a subject we looked at recently. Alistair Thomson in Dakar found that even if some Chinese investments in Africa were losing their lustre, many Chinese firms were taking a longer-term view to pursue strategic expansion – and some were hunting for bargains. For China, Africa also offers an important destination for exports, as any visit to even the most remote African marketplace will quickly show.

Growing trade relations with China were one of the things seen by Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo in a previous blog post as a way for Africa to emerge better off from the financial crisis and less dependent on Western aid.

But China’s involvement in Africa has brought concern from some in the West – quite apart from those who may stand to lose out on the business front – with some critics saying Beijing’s interest is too focused on the drive to secure resources and pays little heed to the kind of thing that Western donors say they want to promote, such as elections, human rights and the fight against corruption.

Time to build Africa?

Where once African officials might have viewed infrastructure projects solely as a good source of kickbacks, these days there is pressure from electorates, at least in some countries, to deliver on promises of improvements.

The growth that many African states have enjoyed in recent years has exposed the failure of the continent’s infrastructure still more starkly – with even South Africa suffering the kind of power outages that much of the rest of Africa has grown far too used to.

Infrastructure is in theory the focus of this year’s African Union summit, although as always it will be overshadowed by crisis in Somalia, Zimbabwe, Congo, Darfur etc…

The global financial crisis is an even bigger threat to hopes of strengthening Africa’s infrastructure.

Last year, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda all set out to borrow money internationally through sovereign bonds, for the upgrade and expansion of roads, water supplies, irrigation schemes and electricity generation capacities. That followed Ghana’s successful launch in 2007 of sub-Saharan Africa’s first Eurobond outside South Africa to help fund infrastructure development.

But the plans of the east African countries have been knocked off course despite early assertions from confident governments that they would not be affected by the global downturn which began in the Western world.

Kenya is exploring alternative ways of raising the $500 million it had originally planned to raise from a debut Eurobond. Tanzania and Uganda both made similar announcements.

from Global News Journal:

Fighting graft in Africa. Or not.

 A little while back, we asked who is and isn’t fighting corruption effectively in Africa. This week, a number of examples bring us back to the subject.

In Tanzania, two former ministers have been charged with flouting procurement rules over the award of a tender for auditing gold mining back in 2002. The pair, who deny wrongdoing, served in the government of President Jakaya Kikwete’s predecessor Benjamin Mkapa. One of them also served under Kikwete himself.

Tanzania’s pledge to fight corruption is under close donor scrutiny and given the level of aid that Tanzania gets - more than one tenth of GDP by 2005 figures - it has little choice but to show willing. There have been doubts in the past, however, about how serious the government really was about going after the most senior and the best connected.