Africa's health

HIV/Aids is no longer the leading cause of death for people in Africa, new statistics reveal. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) most recent data show that the crippling illness is now the second killer in Africans. There were an estimated 760 000 deaths from HIV/Aids in 2015, showing a marked drop from the 1 million deaths in 2010. Although fewer people are dying from the disease, experts say the number is still too high considering preventive methods and education efforts have improved.

Lower respiratory tract infections, such as pneumonia and bronchitis, are now the most deadly disease on the continent.

Third on the list are diarrhoeal diseases, which are caused by viral, bacterial or parasitic infections in the bowels. This is also the second leading cause of death in children under the age of five worldwide as well as in Africa, according to the WHO. These infections are caused by dirty and unsafe water, poor hygiene and bad sanitation in areas where people live and eat.

Fourth on the list are strokes. The number of people dying from a stroke has increased since 2010.

Heart attacks are fifth on the list and have pushed malaria out of the top five for the first time in years.

Most of the above-mentioned diseases are preventable with sufficient funding and access to better care. Countries in Africa, though, continue to be plagued by poverty, which has affected people’s ability to get the care needed to treat these diseases.

South Africa's Poverty

 Pali Lehohla, South Africa's Statistician General, said that absolute poverty is on the rise in South Africa and that children are suffering more than any other group.  Each passing day, more South Africans slip into poverty, more children fall into deprivation. 

More than half of the country lives in poverty. 

One in four South Africans cannot afford to feed themselves adequately, let alone any other necessities. 

StatsSA’s Poverty Trends in South Africa report reveals that between 2011 and 2015, the proportion of people living in poverty (below the poverty line of R1138 per person per month in 2017 prices) increased from 53.2% to 55.5%, equating to 30.4 million people. 

Of these, 13.8 million people (up from 11 million in 2011) live in extreme poverty (below the food poverty line of R531 per person per month), lacking adequate nutrition.

And of course, the burden of poverty is almost entirely borne by black people, courtesy of an unjust apartheid past and the failings of a callous, corrupt ANC government. There are more people receiving social grants (17 million) than people with jobs (16 million) in South Africa.

 67% - two in three - of South Africa’s children live in poverty – a much higher proportion than for any other age group. Over 13 million children, almost all of them black, are growing up in poverty, their early childhood development compromised and their life chances stunted. Millions of children go to sleep on an empty stomach and sleep badly as a result; they go to school on an empty stomach and perform badly as a result. Some 15 000 children per year are admitted to hospital for severe acute malnutrition, of whom around 1 500 die from it. South Africa will never flourish while so many of our children are caught in this cruel poverty trap.

Sharing the water

Better access to irrigation for farmers is key for climate change adaptation. Only 4 to 7 percent of arable land is irrigated in Sub-Saharan Africa, the lowest ratio across the world. Until recently, irrigation had never taken off in Africa for multiple reasons from poor maintenance planning to lack of inputs and market access. Many donor and government-funded large and small-scale irrigation schemes lay dry after a few years of exploitation.

The transfer of irrigation management from public institutions to local water user associations since the 1980s in Africa has always been difficult as the transfer has rarely translated into ownership. No clear boundaries of plots, under-representation of marginalized groups in irrigation groups, for instance women, means there is uneven distribution of water and benefits. Conflicts of interests often occur, collection of maintenance fees trickle down after a while and many schemes are now obsolete. Many irrigation systems were not built with smallholdings in mind, but more as small-scale models of large public schemes. Technically they are often too advanced (80% of smallholder irrigation devices are manual) and once a piece is broken, e.g an electrical motor pump, user groups have no way to fix the whole system. Another example of mismanagement of water is when water is distributed on a weekly roster, it leads to overwatering the fields, and loss of much of the fertilizers,  as farmers will irrigate their crops whether it is required or not.

In the 450 hectares Silalatshani Irrigation Scheme, one of the oldest in Zimbabwe, farmers have learned how to use the Chameleon, a low cost tool to measure soil water moisture availability for the crops through a color code, easy to recognize even for illiterate farmers.  Another device, the Full stop, has helped farmers understand when fertilizers are washed away by excessive irrigation. Farmers began to only use water when crops really needed it (every two to three days instead of daily) and realized this saved a lot of water. This ultimately reduced water conflicts between water users.

More important than looking for ‘technological interventions’ to boost water and farming efficiency, irrigation interventions should focus on investing in building inclusive institutions like Silalatshani and Magozi innovation platforms where members learn step by step to use water more efficiently, earn more per drop and build skills and social connections to become more resilient and prosperous.

 For instance, in the Magozi scheme in Iringa district, Tanzania, only 750 hectares out of a potential of 1,300 ha are irrigated, where farmers produce a meagre one to two tons of rice per hectare. Rice farmers complained about the low prices of their rice harvests and came up with the idea of organizing themselves to collectively sell the rice, invest in storage to be able to later sell when prices are more attractive, and grow varieties that are in higher demand.

http://news.trust.org/item/20170824133536-1vboy/

Contested election results in Africa

The Commonwealth Secretary General Patricia Scotland came to Zambia on 6 August. During her brief visit, she was granted permission by President Lungu to visit the incarcerated UPNI Leader Ilakahinde Hichilema at Mukobeko maximum security prison.

Mrs. Scotland is the second foreign dignitary allowed to visit Hichilema. The first was the former President of Nigeria, Mr. Obasanjo. It may seem that outside pressure has succeeded to soften the hard stance taken by President Lungu against those advocating a political reconciliation between PF and UPND. During her brief visit Mrs. Scotland, reaffirmed the Commonwealth position on the result of the August 2016 presidential elections — in the sense that President Lungu had won.

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Indeed both the European Union and SADC election observers had pronounced the elections free and fair. The UPNI leader Hichilema had disputed the elections and resolved that the UPNI had won despite the lack of credible evidence to support his claims. Though it is too early what was discussed between Hichilema and Mrs. Scotland. In any event, Hichilema was released soon after her visit. Hichilema and five others had been facing treason charges arising from an offence committed in April this year when they tried to stop President Lungu's motorcade on its way to Western province. The action could have resulted in a fatal road accident.

Mrs. Scotland visit to Zambia took place at the height of the Kenya presidential elections where they incumbent president Uhuru Kenyata once again defeated Railla Odinga, by a margin of 10 percent. Odinga has disputed the elections results citing irregularities in the counting of votes. It may come to pass that disputing elections results has become a political culture especially in African countries where parliamentary democracy gives room for manipulating elections. Parliamentary democracy, to differentiate it from single party political systems, has proved to be a recipe for ethnic and tribal animosities.

Politics in Zambia are more or less infused with traditional and cultural prejudices in the sense that most people can only vote for a person with whom they have close ethnic and tribal affinities. Thus winning an election in Zambia depends upon manipulating the relative population densities regardless of the political and intellectual credibilities of a given leader. Political opposition parties can only win the sympathy during periods of unemployment and arising cost of living which translates into rising fuel and mealie meal prices. Social economic development in Zambia is always associated with the prices of copper exports otherwise than with micro-economic policies which may be framed by the ruling government. Thus the fortunes of political parties are dictated by the price of copper and nothing else.

Zambia's economic underdevelopment is tied to its cultural and traditional mentality in the sense that the ruling political elites refuse to acknowledge that capitalism cannot work in the interest of the marginalized workers and peasants. It is impossible to achieve any semblance to economic developments without exploiting the working class. Inflation and unemployment shall never be outlawed from capitalist society and the current political scenario in Zambia must be understood from the overriding cultural and traditional standards prevailing in African countries. The freedom to criticize is everywhere frowned upon and every opposition party is subjected to political molestation that defeats the onus or political pluralism. It becomes a matter of political conjecture to believe that the opposition stands to derail the economic policies introduced by the president Lungu. Due to their lack of class consciousness, it can be predicted that the way people vote is determined by ethnic and tribal prejudices regardless of the fall of mealie meal and fuel prices.

Cephas Mulenga Chimwemwe,

 Kitwe, Zambia 

Angola's Election - Dos Santos does not bow out

Angola’s civil war lasted more than 25 years, ending in 2002, leaving the country devastated. The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita)  are no longer warring over trenches, airstrips and dusty roads through scrubby forests, but fighting for the backing of 9 million voters as Angola goes to the polls on Wednesday to elect a new president.  Unita won just 18% in the last election, in 2012, against the MPLA’s 72%.

 José Eduardo dos Santos is to step down after elections, having ruled for more than four decades. He has been guilty of nepotism, cronyism and corruption. 

“It would be extremely surprising if the MPLA loses power, but this is the first time in the past 40 years where there is uncertainty over what happens next,” said Søren Kirk Jensen, an expert on Angola at the independent policy institute Chatham House.  “There won’t be a revolution,” But Jensen added. “Lourenço is coming with a mandate to do things differently.

Dos Santos was Africa’s longest-serving president after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Unless Unita can win the poll, dos Santos’s place will be taken by 63-year-old João Lourenço, the defence minister.

Dos Santos, will remain president of the MPLA , retaining significant powers and his family will  maintain its hold on a huge business empire. Dos Santos’ daughter Isabel runs the enormous state oil company and is Africa’s richest woman. In one recent poll, nearly 90% said the MPLA leadership acts in its own interest, and not in that of the state or the Angolan people.

There is widespread concern about the fairness of the electoral process. The government has deployed state resources on a huge scale and has consistently repressed critics, moving on 12 August to ban protests and demonstrations by groups not running in the polls. A new law has given regulatory control of all media to a body controlled by the government and the ruling party. Human Rights Watch said the election will be “marred by severe restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, and limited access to information due to government repression and censorship”.

The MPLA  has failed to manage Angola’s economy.  Africa’s second-biggest producer of crude oil, has been hit hard by the global fall in oil prices, with revenues crashing from $60bn three years ago to $27bn in 2016. After years of surging growth, Angola has slipped into recession. One recent symptom of the poverty that 15 years of inefficient and expensive investment have failed to eradicate was an outbreak of yellow fever, among the world’s worst in decades, though the disease can be prevented by a single inoculation.

Poor people, many of them still living in shanty towns visible from the glittering office blocks and luxury hotels that line Luanda’s corniche, have been hit by inflation that peaked at 42% last year, steeply increasing the cost of rent and basic foodstuffs.

The income of the new "middle classes" – including vast numbers of civil servants, soldiers and teachers on the state payroll – has dropped steeply in real terms as salaries have remained unchanged. 

Even the elite have suffered too. Sales of hugely expensive European-made luxury cars have plummeted, dealers in Luanda say.

The economic crisis also undermines the system of political patronage that underpins MPLA rule, said Francisco Miguel Paulo, an economist at the Catholic University of Angola, because it reduces the government’s ability to invest in projects that “benefit the lives of people and bring it popularity. There was a time when Angola had a lot of money and the government had the chance to make a difference. That opportunity was missed,” Paulo said.

Do as I say, not what I do

The presidents of Nigeria, Angola, Zimbabwe, Benin and Algeria all have something in common - an apparent lack of trust in their nations' health systems. They are leaving behind poorly funded and neglected health services, which most of their citizens have to rely on and seeking expensive medical treatments abroad. Unsurprisingly, no presidential spokesman has come out to say that it is because the health service in general is better overseas.

In 2010, the average amount spent on health in African countries per person was $135 (£100) compared to $3,150 in high-income countries, the UN's World Health Organization said. In many African countries, good private healthcare is available to those with money.

In Mugabe's Zimbabwe, for example, state-run hospitals and clinics often run out of basic medicines like painkillers and antibiotics, according to health watchdog Citizens Health Watch. It says that the public health care system "continues to deteriorate at alarming levels" with lack of money being the main problem. Mugabe makes frequent hospital visits to Singapore.

Nigeria's public health system is "terrible" because of poor funding, says BBC Abuja editor Naziru Mikailu. A health insurance scheme for government workers and some private employees has given some people access to private medicine, but most people have to rely on government-funded services.  Nigerian doctor Osahon Enabulele says that the example set by political leaders costs countries millions of dollars. In 2013 he estimated that Nigerians were spending $1bn (£770m) abroad on medical treatment and reckons that figure could have doubled by now. By comparison, the federal government's health budget for 2016 came to $800m. Dr Enabulele, who is vice-president of the Commonwealth Medical Association, says that the money taken out of Nigeria could be invested in the health system at home. "The whole ambition to have state-of-the-art facilities will remain a mirage if people keep going abroad for medical reasons." On top of that, he says, top Nigerian doctors are then enticed abroad looking for the best conditions, exacerbating the situation.

The Angolan government revealed in May that Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has been president for the last 38 years, had travelled to Spain for health reasons.

Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika travels to a hospital in France for what the government calls "periodic" medical checks.

 Benin's President Patrice Talon, 59, travelled to France in June for two operations, one on his prostate and one on his digestive system.

Sudan President Omar al-Bashir had  "an exploratory cardiac catheterisation" at a hospital in the capital, Khartoum. It was, however, a private hospital, not a state one.

When mountains tumble down

Floods and mudslides that left more than 400 people are believed to have been man made. and could have been avoided, according to Joseph Randall, executive director of Green Scenery, a leading environmentalist.

"When you look at the, Sugar Loaf, which is one of the highest mountains in Freetown, there have been a lot of human activities there in terms of removing the forest cover and constructing houses. People fail to realize that those parts of the city are not sitting on firm rocks. They are sitting on red earth (soil) which becomes easily saturated with water. And when that happens, it means then that there are possibilities that it can cleave off. So, that must have been the cause. For me however, the cause has been a long-term effect because human beings are constantly working on construction. They have been interfering into the structure of that hill, to the extend that the soil must have given way gradually until now when  there has been this rain pour and the soil can no longer hold and erosion is taking place. The other issue of flooding is, we have done so much deforestation. So now what happens is - when it rains the water just slides down and finds it way into a bigger mass. We see the effects of it all around the city. This is because of the construction of houses, settlements have expanded to such an extent that we are now close to two million people in the city. But above all our drainage system is also very poor."

 http://www.dw.com/en/sierra-leones-deadly-floods-and-mudslides-were-a-man-made-disaster/a-40152545

Big Game Hunting or Survival

More than 100 Maasai huts in Tanzania have been allegedly burned down by game reserve authorities near the Serengeti National Park. Hundreds of people have reportedly been left homeless by the evacuation of local pastoral communities. One young Maasai is said to have been shot and critically injured. It's the latest example in East Africa of the growing tensions between wildlife conservation, which attracts tourists, and the need for locals to have pastoral land, especially during droughts.

The chairman of Ololosokwani village, Kerry Dukunyi, has told the BBC that villagers have lost property in the latest incident. "A large percentage of our food has been destroyed. We've lost a lot of food," he said. "A lot of our livestock are also missing."

It is part of a longstanding border dispute between local Maasai people and authorities who operate exclusive hunting experiences for tourists. The Tanzanian government had plans to establish a 1,500sq km (579sq mile) wildlife corridor around the national park for a Dubai-based company which offers hunting packages for wealthy tourists from the UAE. The plan would have displaced about 30,000 people, and caused ecological problems for the Maasai community, which depends on the seasonal grasses there to rear livestock.But the country's president tweeted in 2014 that an eviction would not take place, after more than two million people signed a petition against the action. However reported incidents of destruction of Maasai sites persisted.

The "other" refugee crisis

On Thursday, the number of people fleeing across the border from South Sudan to Uganda passed a million, the UN’s refugee agency said. Another million have fled into Ethiopia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most were women and children escaping “barbaric violence”, according to the UNHCR.

Over the past year, an average of 1,800 South Sudanese have arrived in Uganda every day. At the reception centre in Imvepi, 30 miles from the border, officials have logged 1,400 children who have arrived unaccompanied, and 5,400 separated from their families. They include a 14-year-old who had led five younger children across war-torn forest and fields for weeks, a seven-year-old who made it entirely alone, and an abandoned three-year-old who has yet to be identified because he cannot describe his family.

Uganda has a generous policy toward refugees, allowing them to work and travel. Families get a 50 by 50-metre plot of land to farm and build a home.

The Congolese Silent Tsunami

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)  has enough land to feed at least 1 billion people - roughly the population of Africa - and is wealthy in minerals. But grinding poverty and years of conflict have left many of its people chronically hungry.

Hunger in the DRC has soared in the last year, leaving 7.7 million people in urgent need of food aid and pushing the country closer to famine than it has been in a decade, food security experts said. Much of the rise in hunger - 1.8 million new people were added to the list - stems from escalating violence in the Kasai and Tanganyika regions, which in Kasai alone has forced 1.4 million people to flee their homes in the past year. Congo now has 3.8 million people displaced within the country, in addition to a steady flow of refugees from neighbouring Burundi, Central African Republic and South Sudan. The displaced - many of them women - need seeds and farming tools to become self-sufficient, ease pressure on the communities hosting them, and reduce tensions.

More than 1.5 million people are now facing "emergency" hunger levels. "Emergency" means people are forced to sell possessions and skip or reduce their meals. It is one level below a classification of famine in the IPC's internationally-recognised five stages of hunger.

Alexis Bonte, FAO's interim representative in Congo. said, "It's a humanitarian tsunami, but it's a silent tsunami, that's the problem." Bonte explained "It has been hidden by other crises.", referring to South Sudan, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen. 

The crisis has worsened with the advance of fall armyworm, a crop-eating caterpillar that has spread to many parts of the country, including Kasai and Tanganyika, as well as by outbreaks of cholera and measles.

"I think the donors are really tired of funding the crisis in Congo," Bonte said, "We cannot hope to make change if we abandon the people. These people deserve to live in dignity. They have suffered enough," he said.

When local NGOs in Chikapa, a town in Kasai region, provided farmland for some 2,000 families who had fled their homes earlier this year, and FAO gave farming equipment, they were able to harvest vegetables to eat and sell within weeks. "Normally in a development project, it would take a year to do this. This was just a few weeks, because the ladies were desperate to do something ... to escape the trauma they had suffered and ... go back to dignity," Bonte said.