The World Food Programme (WFP) said that 950,000 people were now hungry in northern Mozambique where a worsening conflict has driven hundreds of thousands from their homes,
“Families and individuals have had to abandon their belongings and livelihoods and flee for safety … adding to an already desperate situation in northern Mozambique,” said Tomson Phiri, a WFP spokesman.
Nearly a million people facing severe hunger in Mozambique | Humanitarian Crises News | Al Jazeera
Save the Children says locust swarms, extreme weather and below average rainfall mean millions of people in Somalia will not have enough food.
Crop and vegetable production is expected to drop by up to 80% this season. Income from livestock sales, a mainstay of the Somali economy, is projected to fall by up to 55%.
Mothers are desperately trying to scrape together just one meal a day for their children. Some of them are already malnourished.
Projections say that this year, poor families in southern Somalia will only be able to source 15% of their food from their crops. In other difficult times, their crops have provided about half their food.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-africa-47639452
Congo-Brazzaville, a country of 5.5 million is not a democracy despite regular elections. First elected in 1979, President Sassou has been in power for 36 of the 61 years has been independent from France.
The economy is stagnant. Civil servants go months without wages and pensions. Hospitals go months without basic medicine. Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index ranks Congo-Brazzaville among the world’s top 20 most corrupt countries. The democracy watchdog Freedom House, which scores countries on their political and civic freedoms, lists Sassou’s Congo as “not free”. The UN’s Human Development Index positions the country at 149 out of 189, two points above Assad's Syria.
In last month’s presidential election it brought no surprises. After 36 years in power, Sassou was awarded 88% of the vote with a turnout of more than 67%. Accusations of vote irregularities, including ballot box stuffing, were widespread. His closest rival, who had urged for a “vote for change” died of Covid on the day of the vote.
Most likely, the African Union, the US, the EU, the UK and former colonial power France will simply turn a blind eye to yet another disputed election result while Congolese are dying from extreme poverty. Sassou rules with an iron fist. During the 2021 campaign, Sassou ordered internet services to be shut down for almost a week, including on election day. The interior minister, Raymond Zéphirin Mboulou, not the electoral commission, announced his victory. Many of Sassou’s most vocal opponents, including his former challenger Jean-Marie Michel Mokoko and his former minister André Okombi Salissa, have either been jailed, exiled or are dead. Not long before the March 2021 election, human rights defender Alexandre Ibacka Dzabana was arbitrarily arrested by Sassou’s intelligence officers. He is still detained in Brazzaville where he has been denied access to his lawyer and family. Yet there is barely any indignation from outside the country.
It is an oil-rich country. Congo-Brazzaville is Africa’s sixth-biggest oil producer, earning huge revenues. However, amid Sassou’s kleptocracy, the country remains paradoxically poor, with nearly half the population living below the poverty line.
The theft is a family affair.
His daughter Julienne Sassou Nguesso and her husband, Guy Johnson, have been charged with corruption and money laundering in France.
Global Witness alleged in April 2019 that his other daughter Claudia Sassou Nguesso, who is an MP and the president’s head of communications, received almost $20m (£15m) of apparently stolen state funds and used it to buy a luxury flat in Trump Tower, New York.
His son, Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso, also an elected member of the Congolese parliament, is being groomed to succeed his father. He also allegedly took more than $50m from the Congolese treasury funds for his personal gain, according to a Global Witness.
In 2019, Sassou announced the discovery of new oil deposits which would increase the republic’s daily production from 350,000 barrels a day to 980,000, tripling Congo’s revenues from the oil and natural gas sector. Perhaps this is why power has not changed hands by the ballot box, and serious reforms have not been enacted, while the international community sees nothing, hears nothing and does nothing.
The legitimacy of the former liberation movement, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), has steadily been eroded due to a combination of factors. These have included socioeconomic decline, SWAPO’s increasingly outdated populist narrative, financial scandals, and elite self-enrichment. In addition, opposition has grown in the form of electoral support for new parties.
After independence from South Africa in 1990 it won elections by huge margins, enabling it to entrench its power. Like other former liberation movements, its legitimacy centered on the idea that citizens owed the party unconditional loyalty in return for liberation. But heroic narratives tend to have a sell by date. If people feel neglected, their loyalty will decline. Since 2015 it’s become increasingly clear that SWAPO has lost appeal among the younger generation as the struggle for liberation passes into history. This generation expects good governance and measures it not in rhetoric, but in delivery. After all, they were born into an independent state. Their number as voters is about to become a majority.
Namibia's relative wealth is anything but fairly distributed. Inequality remains at staggering proportions. According to the latest United Nations Human Development Report, over half of employed Namibians earn less than US$95 (N$ 1,400) a month. Even among those in paid employment this amounts to less than the average per capita income for sub-Saharan Africa.
Why many won't be celebrating Namibia's independence day — Quartz Africa (qz.com)
In 1990, East Asia accounted for half of the global poor, whereas some 15 per cent lived in sub-Saharan Africa; by 2015 forecasts, this is almost exactly reversed: sub-Saharan Africa accounts for half of the global poor, with some 12 per cent living in East Asia. Poverty is declining in all regions but it is becoming deeper and more entrenched in countries that are either conflict-ridden or overly dependent on commodity exports. That poverty has become an ever-present situation in sub-Saharan Africa.
Political leaders most of whom are used to mouthing the cliché that we have no business being poor. However, what most of them fail to understand is that poverty goes beyond the shortage of common things such as food, clothing, shelter and safe drinking water, all of which determine the quality of life. It is inclusive of educational attainment and gender inequality, for example.
According to most findings, poverty in sub-Saharan Africa can largely be attributed to the region’s venality and impuissant economic and social policies. Others assert that the region’s economic woes lie in the lack of well-structured institutions. However, poverty in sub-Saharan Africa could be traceable to a number of factors like lack of democracy, poor management of resource and revenues, high level of corruption, weak rule of law, and lack of infrastructure. Other factors which can also be both causes and after-effects of poverty are overpopulation, crime, war, discrimination, poor access to affordable health care, malnutrition, diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS, which overwhelmingly afflict poor sub-Saharan African countries.
The inability of governments to control or effectively manage things like erosion, desertification and overgrazing, geographic factors such as access to fertile land, fresh water, minerals, energy, and other natural resources have continued to contribute to the expanding poverty in the sub-continent. Yet those living in poverty, experts say, suffer lower life expectancy as millions of people die every year due to lower access to quality healthcare induced by poverty.
It is also important to tackle high level corruption which has in most of the countries, exacerbated the poverty of majority of the people. By diverting scarce resources to private hands at the expense of much needed projects such as schools, hospitals, roads and reliable institutions, poverty is being reinforced.
Nearly 20 million people face a food crisis in West Africa and the Sahel region as the vast area is torn by conflicts and the coronavirus pandemic, experts warned.
The situation could worsen between June and August, with as many as 27 million people needing immediate food aid, or nearly one in 10 people in 14 countries.
In Nigeria alone, 12.8 million people could face a food crisis "or worse" this summer, according to the Food Crisis Prevention Network, which includes representatives of governments, NGOs, lenders and UN agencies.
In addition to conflict, the displacement of 5.6 million people, weak economies and the pandemic have worsened food shortages in the region, according to the network.
Nearly three million people could face a food crisis in Burkina Faso in the coming months, 2.3 million in Niger, 1.8 million each in Chad and Sierra Leone, 1.3 million in Mali and nearly one million in Liberia.
Niger's former prime minister Ibrahim Mayaki, honorary president of the Sahel and West Africa Club, said, "It is essential we change the way we deal with crises. It means investing in the long term to address the root causes of famine and malnutrition."
West Africa faces worsening food crisis: Experts | Africanews
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with its untapped deposits of raw minerals estimated to be worth in excess of $24-trillion, is widely considered to be the richest country in the world. It has large reserves of cobalt, gold, gems, copper, timber and uranium. However, the most valuable resource that the DRC possesses is its large reserve of diamonds. It has one of the largest forest reserves in Africa, the world’s second-largest rainforest and about half of the hydroelectric potential of the continent.
Zambia is the continent’s biggest copper producer and has the world’s ninth richest copper deposits. The big four mines, Barrick Lumwana, FQM Kansanshi, Motani and Konkola Copper Mines (KCM), account for around 80% of Zambia’s annual copper production. Most copper is used in electrical equipment such as wiring and motors, in construction, and industrial machinery (such as heat exchangers). Barrick Lumwana is wholly owned by the Canadian company Barrick, which is one of the world’s largest gold mining companies. The other three each have a majority foreign shareholding. The Zambian government, through its investment holding company, ZCCM-IH, is a minority shareholder in nearly all of them.
Ghana is Africa’s largest gold producer and is also a major producer of bauxite, manganese and diamonds with 23 large-scale mining companies. There are also over 300 registered small-scale mining groups and 90 mine support service companies. The mining industry in Ghana accounts for some 5% of the country’s GDP and minerals make up 37% of total exports, of which gold contributes over 90% of the total mineral exports.
70% of the world’s cocoa beans come from four West African countries, namely Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are by far the two largest producers of cocoa, accounting for more than 50% of the world’s cocoa.
Nigeria is the world’s 11th-largest and Africa’s biggest crude oil producer, with 18 operating pipelines and an average daily production of over two million barrels in 2019. The petroleum industry accounts for about 9% of Nigeria’s GDP and for over 90% of oil export value.
Arlit, the uranium mining operation in Niger, ranks as the fourth largest in the world by uranium production.
The Rio Tinto-operated Rössing uranium mine, located in Namibia, is the sixth-largest uranium producing mine. Langer Heinrich uranium mine, located in the 40km southeast of Rössing, is the ninth-largest uranium producing mine in the world.
South Africa is a member of the G20 and WEF; sits on the UN Security Council. The South Deep gold mine in South Africa is one of the largest gold mines in the world, by reserves. South Africa also produces coal.
None of the African countries benefit and all export, only to re-import finished products, often at about 10 times the original cost.
This guarantees jobs on other continents, mostly Europe, but condemns Africa to a self-perpetuating, vicious cycle of abject poverty.
The irony of Africa and Covid-19 – a continent so ric... (dailymaverick.co.za)
The European Union, the United States and the World Bank has provided more than $100m for the COVID-19 response, while the International Monetary Fund has given some $200m in loans.
“The wealth of this country – from oil and elsewhere – bypasses its people, siphoned off in secrecy with no public accountability for how it is spent,” said David Shearer, the United Nations’ head of mission in South Sudan, in his final address to the UN Security Council in March. The international community, he noted, had failed to question its role in South Sudan’s continuing dependence on foreign aid.
A black market appeared for COVID-19 tests that were supposed to be free. Tests were offered for $50, while test certificates needed for ground and air travel were sold for $400.
In January, the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, released a worrying report (PDF), detailing an overview of South Sudan’s bleak humanitarian situation. Opaque bureaucratic and regulatory snags had also resulted in “diverted resources that would have otherwise been used for lifesaving supplies”, the report noted.
The health ministry also handpicked at least 500 largely untrained staff from the ministry to work on the response and be paid between $450 and $1,500 a month with donor funds. Although it is not uncommon to hire untrained workers in emergency responses many of the proposed salaries were triple what skilled civil servants would normally earn, and the government has failed in recent years to pay health workers for months.
After the pandemic struck, South Sudan allocated $5.48m for the response from April 1 through September 30, 2020, according to government documents shared with reporters by a government official who asked not to be named.
Of those funds, $3.8m in contracts was awarded to a South Sudanese company with Lebanese and South Sudanese shareholders, AFK Concept Ltd. As part of pandemic preparations, the company was meant to renovate the Dr John Garang Infectious Disease Center in Juba. Part of that amount included $22,500 for landscaping and $168,000 for painting – costs nearly double those of other companies reporters contacted for estimates of similar work. The 250-bed facility was meant to be the main hospital for COVID-19 patients. As of April 2021, however, it was still being used largely for storage. Hospital staff told reporters although renovations had been made, the work failed to meet the needs of an infectious disease centre, including too few toilets and structures that were inadequate to quarantine infected patients. An inflated contract awarded to a company to renovate a hospital that still sits empty.
And the government authorised one small outfit to produce hand sanitiser. The Drug and Food Control Authority gave Sinco Medical the authorisation to manufacture and distribute the sanitiser – while banning imports of the product as people scrambled to find supplies. In March 2020, the Drug and Food Control Authority told a businessman and his colleagues they would not be allowed to import 100,000 bottles of hand sanitiser from Kenya but instead had to buy from Sinco. People across the country struggled to find sanitiser months after coronavirus cases started to emerge. Prices had soared more than tenfold, according to a May report by the Sudd Institute, a local think-tank that has researched the economic consequences of COVID-19.
A rather lengthy but informative essay on the relationships of nature conservativism and the present dispossession of the pastoralists in Kenya.
