Monthly Archives: April 2018

2, April 2018

Botswana inaugurates new president Masisi in smooth handover ⁰

Botswana’s new president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, used his inauguration speech on Sunday to vow to tackle youth unemployment in one of Africa’s most stable countries.

The swearing-in ceremony in parliament came after Ian Khama stepped down having completed the constitutional maximum of 10 years in office.

As the vice president, Masisi took over automatically, and he is likely to secure a further five-year term in elections in October 2019 when the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) is expected to hold on to power.

Botswana prides itself on good governance and rule of law, and the carefully managed handover of power comes a full 18 months ahead of parliamentary elections in 2019.

Masisi, the former vice president, takes over a country widely seen as an African success story that has made good use of its lucrative income from diamond, beef and tourism.

It is rated as the least corrupt country in Africa by Transparency International.

But it has also struggled with rising unemployment rate of about 18 percent and an HIV epidemic.

“It is because of the peace and tranquillity that our leaders have sustained for so long that Batswana (people) have continued to enjoy relative prosperity,” Masisi said after taking his oath.

“One of my top priorities as the president of this country will be to address the problem of unemployment especially amongst the young people.”

He also pledged to improve treatment and prevention of HIV in a country with a 22 percent infection rate among adults.

Continuity politics

President Masisi, 55, is a close ally of Khama and a BDP veteran.

He is a US-educated former teacher, UNICEF official and education minister, whose father was also a cabinet minister.

“Despite its small size, Botswana continues to play an important role in the promotion of global issues such as respect for human rights, democracy, good governance (and) the rule of law,” Masisi said.

Khama, 65, completed a months-long national farewell tour last week, bidding goodbye to the country’s population of 2.2 million.

He earned a record for straight talking, often criticising leaders including US President Donald Trump and unlike many in the region neighbouring Zimbabwe’s then-president Robert Mugabe as well as Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.

Khama led the BDP to landslide victories in two elections, although the party won less than 50 percent of the vote for the first time in 2014.

“Internationally, Khama positioned himself as a moral leader,” Matteo Vidiri, a BMI Research analyst, told AFP.

“(But) a slowing economy and increasing public discontent has damaged the narrative of Botswana’s ‘special character’, of a country being able to escape the ‘resource curse’.”

Four opposition parties have said they could unite for the 2019 election to try to unseat the BDP, which has held power since independence from Britain in 1966.

At a farewell event in his home village, Khama was showered with gifts including a 4×4 truck, 143 cows, hundreds of chickens, more than 415,000 pula ($44,000, 35,000 euro) and a fully-equipped luxury caravan.

His father, Seretse Khama, served from 1966 to 1980 as Botswana’s first president.

(AFP)

2, April 2018

Rome: Francis laments killing of defenseless Palestinians ⁰

Pope Francis, in his traditional Easter message, has lamented the killing of well over a dozen “defenseless” Palestinian protesters by Israeli troopers’ live fire near the Israeli-Gaza border, pleading for peace in the Holy Land.

The Pontiff, 81, on Sunday made the comments and appeal in his “Urbi et Orbi” (to the City and the World) message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome to tens of thousands of people in the flower-bedecked square below where he earlier celebrated a Mass.

In an apparent reference to the massacre in the besieged Gaza Strip on Friday, when Israeli soldiers and snipers shot dead 17 Palestinian demonstrators, the head of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics also called for “a reconciliation for the Holy Land”, which “also experiencing in these days the wounds of ongoing conflict that do not spare the defenseless”.

During Friday’s bloody protest, around 30,000 Gazans marched on the fence with the occupied territories at the start of a six-week protest, dubbed “The Great March of Return,” demanding the right to return to their homeland.

The rallies coincided with the 42nd anniversary of Land Day, which commemorates the murder of six Palestinians by Israeli forces in 1976.

The demonstrations turned violent after Israeli forces used tear gas and live fire to force back demonstrators who had approached within a few hundred meters of the heavily-fortified fence, further wounding more than 1,400 other Palestinians.

Multiple Muslim nations around the world voiced their outrage over the Israeli military’s response to the mass demonstration in Gaza.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared Saturday a national day of mourning and urged a general strike in honor of the victims. He also said that Israel was “fully responsible” for the tragic killings of peaceful Palestinian protesters. The strike, which affected universities, schools, government organizations, was called for in the occupied West Bank in solidarity with Gaza.

Israeli military forces have shot and killed 16 Palestinians during massive anti-Israeli rallies staged by thousands along Gaza-Israel borders.

While the Muslim nations were outraged by the carnage, the deadliest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the 2014 Gaza War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the troops via his official Twitter account late on Saturday for their actions which he claimed were aimed at guarding Israel.

On Friday, the UN Security Council held an emergency meeting over the situation in Gaza, but the US blocked a draft statement which urged restraint and called for an “independent and transparent investigation” into Friday’s violence.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also called for “an independent and transparent investigation” into the incident.

Culled from Presstv

2, April 2018

CPDM Crime Syndicate: Ex- govt officials held over corruption spend Easter in jail ⁰

Basile Atangana Kouna, Cameroon’s former water and energy minister and other top government officials held over an anti-corruption crackdown have been shown in a video commemorating Easter in prison.

Journalists tweeted screengrabs of Basile and others – Nguini Effa, Mendo Ze and Jena Willian Solo – all in suit taking part in mass on the eve of Easter at the Kondengui maximum security prison located in the capital, Yaounde.

The three other detainees are a former Ministry of Public Works official, the head of a state company, and the ex-rector of the University of Douala.

The religious service involved a church set up in the prison with a priest delivering a sermon. The former ministers a joined by other attendees sitting under a tent following proceedings.

It is largely held that the four are being detained as part of an anti-corruption drive known as Operation Sparrowhawk. It remains to be known which particular case Basile is to be charged with.

He was arrested and deported from Nigeria in March after President Biya kicked him out of a March 2 cabinet reshuffle. He had already been ordered the previous month not to leave the country.

As a result of its oil wealth, corruption has been widely reported especially in the area of revenues from crude exports. Transparency International ranked it 153 out of 180 countries on its annual corruption perceptions index.

Biya,85, has ruled the Central African nation since taking over from a retiring predecessor in 1982. He won the 1983 polls with 99.98 percent and has since won reelection at every election cycle.

He is expected to again seek re-election in presidential polls later this year. The first of multi-level elections, Senate vote, was held last month. The presidency has yet to announce a date for the presidential and other elections.

Cameroon’s oil-dependent economy has been crippled by low crude prices. And separatists are mounting a guerrilla campaign in the country’s two English-speaking provinces, demanding independence from the majority Francophone Central African nation.

Culled from Africa News

1, April 2018

France and the Ambazonian vigil at Nigerian Embassy in South Africa ⁰

For the past three weeks, an encampment of activists from Ambazonia, the English-speaking territory also known as Southern Cameroon, has been holding vigil outside the Nigerian Embassy in South Africa. The purpose is to demand the immediate release of leaders in their struggle with the French neo-colonial regime in Cameroon, and to shine a light on Nigeria’s betrayal of the Ambazonian people. In January 2018, Nigeria arrested and handed over several Ambazonian refugees to the Cameroonian regime, the second longest-running dictatorship in the world.

Cameroonian authorities have since announced that among those Nigeria handed to them was Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, regarded by millions of Ambazonians as their political representative in the struggle for their basic human rights. Ambazonia has been under military occupation by Cameroon since 1961, and, all this time, the people have been struggling for basic human rights and dignity. Tensions rose sharply in October 2016 in response to a strike by legal workers to defend the Ambazonian common law–based judicial system from the Cameroonian regime’s attempt to replace it with a French colonial court system.

In response, the Cameroon military used force. They deployed helicopter gunships to shoot live ammunition at protesters, executed hundreds and detained more than a thousand summarily and without charge. In direct response, some factions of Ambazonians have chosen to defend their communities with force. These acts have created a wave of refugees crossing the border to Nigeria in fear for their lives.

The UNHCR had registered 20,291 refugees as of March 8; community leaders on the ground count close to 60,000. Ayuk Tabe and 11 other Ambazonian leaders, who were betrayed by the Nigerian government, had gathered at the Nera Hotel, Abuja to plan a meeting with the UNHCR on the plight of the refugees when they were arrested. Nigeria’s handing over of these activists to Cameroon, clearly done under pressure from France, was a violation of the principle of non-refoulement, a fundamental pillar of international humanitarian law, which forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution. It has drawn rebuke from Amnesty International, the UNHCR, and even the US Department of State. Moreover, it constituted a devastating attack on the survival of the Ambazonian people.

Ayuk Tabe has recently emerged as a unifying figure that commands the respect and confidence of the Ambazonian community. This betrayal on the part of the Nigerian government is not just injurious to the Ambazonian people. In fact it is deeply harmful to Nigeria as well, and should be read as the most overt display yet of France’s calculated conquest of the whole of Africa.

Nigeria has always been the crown jewel of the French project to re-conquer all of Africa. Through a combination of underhandedness, blackmail and influence peddling ,France has meddled in Nigeria affairs since the eve of her independence. When the Biafran war broke out in 1967, France positioned itself as its international champion — serving as the main supplier of weapons and mercenaries to the Biafran army and declaring “Biafra Week” on March 11-17. Yet France declined to formally recognize Biafra — which was what they needed the most in their struggle.

Having blackmailed their way into huge oil concessions from the northern-dominated federal government with their support for Biafra, France then switched sides and betrayed the Biafrans to government. The spoils of this act were demonstrated four years after the defeat of the Biafrans, when a French oil company emerged as the biggest winner in the 1974 issuing of new oil leases by the Nigerian government. Today, some French institutions and operatives play an oversize role in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. Observers are not surprised that Nigeria is slowly becoming France’s gendarme in Africa. Evidence of this lies in the disjuncture between Nigeria’s response to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, vs. to Côte d’Ivoire. Nigerian political leadership has never found the courage to criticise electoral fraud in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, two French clientele regimes to Nigeria’s immediate eastern and south-eastern borders which can boast of the world’s longest-running and second longest-running dictatorships in the world. The forcible return of the Ambazonian prisoners, including Ayuk Tabe, is in keeping with this behavior.

French oil interests are the driving factor in the move to squelch the movement for human rights in Ambazonia. Were it to gain the attention it deserves, more than just Ambazonians would raise their voices for their fair share of the profits reaped by the French extraction industry in Africa.

Source: Vanguard Nigeria

1, April 2018

Anthony Joshua wins WBO belt as undefeated feat continues ⁰

Britain’s Anthony Joshua moved a step closer to becoming undisputed heavyweight champion of the world on Saturday after beating New Zealander Joseph Parker on a unanimous points decision in their title unification bout.

The 2012 Olympic champion, taken to 12 rounds for the first time in his professional career after 20 previous knockouts, added Parker’s WBO belt to his own WBA Super, IBFand IBO titles.

The three judges scored it 118-110, 118-110 and 119-109 to Joshua, leaving only Deontay Wilder’s WBC title still to conquer.

With the current feat, Joshua moves a step closer to becoming undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

“It’s difficult when someone comes in and is backing off a lot of the time and so on and so forth, but so be it, history was made, Joseph (Parker) played a massive part in this, his whole camp did, and I’m honored to have shared the ring with him.

“… and what’s interesting is Joseph won’t give up now, do you know what I mean, he’s still young, competitive, and I’ve a feeling we’ll definitely see Joseph Parker again but, as you said, I think just on this evening I was more focused, more disciplined, and I carried out the tactics and I was the better man it seemed,” Joshua said after the contest.

Both fighters had stepped into the ring undefeated, with Joshua weighing in six pounds heavier than his shorter opponent and with a longer reach.

If some had expected an early knockout it did not pan out that way, even if Joshua could be said to have controlled most of the 12 rounds by using his jab and left hooks to telling effect.

REUTERS

1, April 2018

Namibia President says Africa-China relations has no colonization motives ⁰

Namibia President Hage Geingob said China is not colonizing Africa and that growing cooperation between the world’s No. 2 economy and Africa benefits both sides, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported on Saturday.

The report said Geingob, currently on a state visit to China, said “comments smearing bilateral cooperation” between China and Namibia are “doomed to fail.”

“We are mature, we can choose our friends, we can choose what we want for, and what’s good for us,” Geingob said.

No country in the world has added so much value to our products as China has. China has done a lot of technology transfer and job creation.

Africa has been a region of focus for Beijing’s quest for greater global influence, with billions of dollars being pumped into infrastructure projects in the continent. Some critics have questioned China’s motives, however, accusing it of seeking to secure key raw materials such as oil and minerals.

In March, then-U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned African countries should be careful not to forfeit their sovereignty when they accept loans from China. He said at that time that if an African government “gets into trouble” after accepting a Chinese loan they could lose control of its infrastructure or resources through default.

China has repeatedly rejected accusations that it is only interested in Africa for its mineral resources and said its no-strings-attached aid programmes are widely welcomed.

Geingob also told Xinhua that China-Africa cooperation is on equal footing and that China’s investment in his country is not just “digging out resources.”

”No country in the world has added so much value to our products as China has. China has done a lot of technology transfer and job creation,” the Namibian president told Xinhua.

REUTERS

1, April 2018

Turkey says French troops in Syria would amount to invasion ⁰

Turkey has warned France over bolstering its military presence in Syria, stressing that such a move would amount to an invasion.

“If France takes any steps regarding its military presence in northern Syria, this would be an illegitimate step that would go against international law and in fact, it would be an invasion,” said Turkish Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli on Saturday.

“Especially if they intend to support terror group elements or give direct or indirect protection with armed forces, this would be a really calamitous step,” he added.

Canikli’s remarks came in response to a Thursday pledge by French President Emmanuel Macron to further support US-backed Kurdish militants in northern Syria.

Turkey began the so-called Operation Olive Branch in Afrin on January 20 to clear the northern Syrian border of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a US-backed Kurdish militant group which Ankara associates with the homegrown Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighting for autonomy on Turkish soil.

Macron’s remarks also drew an angry reaction from Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag, who said Friday that the promise to back the Kurds amounts to support for and legitimization of terrorist groups.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also denounced France’s stance as “completely wrong.”

Source: Presstv

1, April 2018

Ambazonia Crisis: Over 4000 arrested ⁰

More than 4000 Southern Cameroonians have so far been arrested by troops and security forces loyal to the Biya Francophone Beti Ewondo regime in Yaoundé since French Cameroun declared a war against the English speaking population in West Cameroon.

Biya’s surprise war declaration came after more than a year of anti- French Cameroun government protests and increasing divisions in the once United Republic of Cameroon. The ruling CPDM crime syndicate has for the first time picked a Southern Cameroonian, Paul Atanga Nji, to be its new operations manager overseeing the genocide currently going on in Southern Cameroons.

He was sworn in as Minister of Territorial Administration and has toured the breakaway Federal Republic of Ambazonia with a dubious message calling for “inclusive dialogue”. Human rights groups have said approximately 4000 Southern Cameroonians have been detained ever since the Anglophone uprising started last year and over a thousand have been killed.

The Francophone dominated army has been killing peaceful civilians including Anglophone security forces still serving in La Republique du Cameroun, setting villages and Southern Cameroons financial institutions ablaze. The French Cameroun army is also involved in the illicit movement of firearms, destroying Southern Cameroons monuments and public institutions (and) blocking roads.

Cameroon under the 85 year-old President Biya spiraled into crisis more than a year ago when the country’s English speaking communities began protesting a diabolic harsh ploy to destroy their Anglo-Saxon heritage. The regime in Yaoundé responded with force hoping to quell the unrest. The arrests under the latest crackdown have been mainly in the rural areas in the Southern and Northern zones.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai