Mocambique: Still Reeling

MOZAMBIQUE

Still Reeling

Mozambique is facing a potentially disastrous outbreak of cholera in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai, the deadly storm that killed at least 468 people and affected nearly two million people in the southern African country.

After the cyclone hit the port city of Beira on March 14, thousands of people were trapped in submerged villages without access to clean water for more than a week, raising concerns about water-borne and infectious diseases, Reuters reported.

The World Health Organization has already confirmed five cases of cholera and will begin a vaccination campaign next week with 900,000 doses slated to arrive Monday.

Mozambique has had regular outbreaks of the disease over the past five years, with about 2,000 people infected during the last one, which ended in February 2018. But the massive damage to Beira’s water and sanitation infrastructure has raised concerns that an epidemic among its dense population could spiral out of control.

Libya: Refugee Pirates

LIBYA

Refugee Pirates

More than 100 migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe hijacked a merchant vessel that rescued them off the coast of Libya and demanded to be taken to Malta.

The migrants took over the ship after being told they would be returned to Libya, the BBC reported. But Malta’s military said it would not allow the ship to enter its waters and Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini declared that the hijacking turned the would-be refugees into “pirates.”

The present location of the cargo ship is unknown and details about the rescue operation are scanty, the BBC said. Salvini identified the ship as the Turkish oil tanker El Hiblu 1, according to the Associated Press.

The incident comes as the European Union is preparing to end its naval patrols of the Mediterranean, which have saved tens of thousands of people but have drawn criticism from Salvini – who claims the operation has continued to bring migrants to Italian shores.

Cyclone Idi And Southern Africa

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/geopolitical-toll-cyclone-idai-southern-africa

South Africa Has Some Serious Off Shore Oil Reserves

Total drills in world's fastest current in South African oil search

Mar 26 2019 07:12 

Paul Burkhardt, Bloomberg

Bloomberg

RELATED ARTICLES

Oil and gas find could help SA set up sovereign wealth fund, says Mantashe

Total offshore find fits with Operation Phakisa, says Cabinet

What a major offshore gas find means for South Africa's energy future

Total's landmark find could be enough to supply SA refineries for 4 years

 

Total SA’s discovery of South Africa’s first oil in deep water could prove to be a bonanza for a country lacking crude reserves of its own and prompt a rush from other majors. That’s if they’re able to solve the engineering challenges of operating in one of the fastest ocean currents in the world.

The Brulpadda find, with reserves estimated at about 1 billion barrels of oil, is located in deep waters around 175 kilometers from SA’s coastline. It could be enough to supply SA refineries for almost four years and be a major boost for the country’s struggling economy.

But the prospect is surrounded by the Agulhas Current, a fast-moving flow of warm water where the Atlantic and Indian oceans converge, which travels the country’s east coast and can cause waves the height of a multistory building. Total says it’s found solutions to the problems, but not every explorer has the financial resources or harsh-environment experience of the French oil major.

• Subscribe to Fin24’s newsletter here 

When Total returned for a second attempt in December, with the Deepsea Stavanger rig to finish a well, it employed previously unused engineering techniques. While rigs are usually carefully stabilised in the water by thrusters as drilling takes place, Total further secured the platform with a tug boat to provide support.

Rough Environment

Total had to cancel an initial drilling attempt in 2014. The highly anticipated attempt had to be abandoned because of mechanical failures caused by the rough environment.

The first try lasted a few months and cost about $190m, according to Dave van der Spuy, resource evaluation manager at Petroleum Agency South Africa, which promotes exploration for the South African government.

The French oil major cited repairs needed to the Eirik Raude rig, and its commitment to another contract, as reasons for suspending activity.

• READ: Total's huge discovery opens new petroleum play off SA's coast

While the North Sea is harsh, at least it’s predictable, said Adewale Fayemi, general manager for Total E&P South Africa. “Here in South Africa, waves and currents are most of the time in opposite directions, which generates very bad seas and the wind can be very high and changes direction.”

Second Attempt

The second time around, Total also used onshore high-frequency radar to keep ahead of the Agulhas Current, Fayemi said. It also used a simplified riser system, which is a pipe that connects an offshore production structure on the water’s surface to sub-sea facilities, that could be accessed and repaired on location, specifically to avoid problems which ended the team’s effort four years earlier.

“Total deployed a suitable rig for the operation and a sophisticated weather forecasting system, coupled with the presence of an on-site specialist, in order to more accurately assess prevailing weather and ocean conditions,” Fayemi said.

The second attempt also took less time and was cheaper, costing about $160m, according to Van der Spuy. “It’s an incredible achievement in terms of engineering and in terms of taking a risk.”

Total plans to acquire 3-D seismic for the license this year, to help determine its next prospects there, which it plans to follow up with as many as four exploration wells.

Mali: Barbarity Of Another Age

MALI

‘Barbarity of Another Age’

Gunmen costumed as traditional hunters killed at least 134 people and injured 55 others in an attack on a village in central Mali on Saturday.

The Malian government vowed “to hunt down the perpetrators of this barbarity of another age and to punish them,” CNN reported.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the attack on the village of Ogossagou in the Mopti region. But the region’s Fulani ethnic community is frequently targeted, and accused of having ties to jihadist organizations in the area, according to the United Nations.

A day after the incident, Mali’s government announced it was disbanding the Dan Na Ambassagou self-defense group composed of members of the Dogon ethnic group, though it made no direct connection between the Dogon group and the attack.

Violence appears to be intensifying in central Mali and particularly in the Mopti region, where ethnic strife is taking a toll on women and children, said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

“Since 2017, rising insecurity has led to an increase in the killing, maiming and recruitment of children. Gender-based violence is on the rise,” Fore said.

Algeria: Has Spring Arrived?

ALGERIA

Has Spring Arrived?

Call them hooligans. Call them activists. Either way, young soccer fans are raising their voices and calling for change in Algeria.

“A marginalized class will always find a way to carve out its own territory and, in Algeria, that space exists in football stadiums,”wrote the Mail & Guardian, a South African newspaper.

Earlier this month, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, an 82-year-old who suffered a debilitating stroke six years ago, was undergoing treatment in a Swiss hospital. Yet he intended to seek a fifth term to extend his 20-year rule when voters were slated to go to the polls to elect their head of state in April.

Algerians who have lived under Bouteflika have suffered as the price of oil has dropped, tanking the North African country’s economy. Youth unemployment especially is high. His decision to stand for an office he is clearly too frail to occupy renewed the spark that created the Arab Spring, a series of popular uprisings that rocked the region in 2011, the leftwing newsmagazine Counterpunch explained.

Protests erupted. Remarkably, Bouteflika announced that he would drop his candidacy, Al Jazeera wrote. But he also indefinitely delayed presidential elections, a move that appeared designed to shut people up without delivering change. It had the opposite effect.

The protesters began chanting as if they were in a soccer stadium: “Either you leave or we’re going to leave” and “No fifth mandate for you, Bouteflika.”

Algeria is now in a political limbo that Bloomberg warned could be potentially dangerous because no one is stepping up to become the country’s leader. Without a leader to channel the demands of the crowds, the street’s demands are likely to grow more extreme. In that environment, the Algerian military might react with a violent crackdown that could lead to civil war. Or other forces, like militant Islamists, might step into the vacuum. The former occurred in Syria. The latter occurred in Egypt. Both occurred in Algeria in the 1990s.

Bouteflika’s political party, the National Liberation Front, isn’t helping. Interim party leader Moab Bouchareb recently told party honchos that the party supported the protesters, the Associated Press reported. But on the same day, Reuters wrote, he also told local television that the party “values the decisions” of the president.

The country is at an impasse, wrote Abdelkader Cheref, a US-based Algerian scholar, in an op-ed in the National, a Gulf newspaper. Cheref suggested that the army, an institution that wields enormous power, help the country transition to a full-fledged democracy.

The protesters might or might not accept that proposal. Either way, they want real progress soon.

Zimbabwe's Mining Sector Is Moving In A Pro-Business Direction

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/zimbabwes-mining-sector-moving-pro-business-direction

Burkina Faso: Steps Forward,Steps backward

BURKINA FASO

Steps Forward, Steps Backward

BBC reporters recently discovered a sad date scribbled on a school blackboard in Foubé in northern Burkina Faso: December 15, 2018.

That’s the last time children attended class in the building.

“A lot of schools have been torched. Teachers have been attacked and some even killed,” headteacher Samuel Sawadogo told the BBC. “When a teacher is killed, no one does anything – so we have to save ourselves.”

Education and other services have stopped in sections of the landlocked West African country following an explosion of violence stemming from Islamist militants who became active around three years ago.

The tragedy is that, until recently, Burkina Faso had been one of the rare countries in the region that avoided jihadist violence. The fighting started, however, when an insurrection toppled former president Blaise Compaoré after 27 years in power, noted an Al Jazeera video. Now, unrest that has been rampant in Mali, Niger and Libya has bled into the country.

Now potential links between al Qaeda and the jihadist groups have led the US to consider whether to send military advisers and drones to the country on the edge of the Sahara, CNN reported.

The jihadists have sparked further violence between ethnic communities in the north, where the majority Mossi people have accused Fulani herders of supporting the terrorists. The fighting has also prompted 115,000 people to seek safety in emergency camps, overloading government officials and international aid agencies, the United Nations Refugee Agency said in a press release. It warned that the situation would likely grow worse.

Bibata Diande was in her last year of high school when she fled torch-wielding terrorists who rode into her village on motorcycles in January. “We brought nothing,” she told Reuters at the camp for displaced people where her family now lives. “I do nothing all day.”

This year, the government of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré declared a state of emergency, giving expanded power to security forces fighting Ansarul Islam and other jihadist groups, wrote the Defense Post.

Those forces have come under criticism, however. The Burkinabé Movement for Human and Peoples’ Rights recently reported that while the government claimed it had “neutralized” almost 150 terrorists, in fact the troops had summarily executed 60 people who were mostly Fulani – raising questions about whether the military was acting illegally against a minority group.

On March 24, voters in Burkina Faso are slated to vote in areferendum that would reduce the power of the president and enact other reforms, like an independent judiciary.

It’s a pity the country might soon take a step forward even while still losing ground.

Mocambuique: Massive Devastation

MOZAMBIQUE

Mass Devastation

Cyclone Idai may have killed as many as 1,000 people in Mozambique, President Filipe Nyusi said after flying over some of the worst hit areas of the country on Monday.

The storm made landfall on Thursday near the port city of Beira, but aid workers were only able to reach the site to take stock of the devastation on Sunday, the BBC reported. So far, the official death toll is recorded as 84.

But with winds of up to 106 miles per hour, the cyclone left almost nothing in its path undamaged.

“No building is untouched. There is no power. There is no telecommunications. The streets are littered with fallen electricity lines,” said Gerald Bourke of the United Nations’ World Food Program.

President Nyusi described seeing bodies floating in the rivers as he flew overhead.

In Zimbabwe, too, at least 98 people have died and 217 people are missing, while in Malawi flooding associated with the storm killed at least 122 people.

CRIMEA

Nigeria: Dereliction And Tragedy

NIGERIA

Dereliction and Tragedy

Emergency workers were scrambling to rescue scores of schoolchildren trapped in the rubble of a three-story building that collapsed Wednesday in the Nigerian city of Lagos.

At least 10 people have been confirmed dead and 40 others have been rescued alive, BBC reported. Witnesses said that at least 100 children were in the primary school on the building’s top floors when the structure collapsed.

The cause of the accident is not yet known, but such disasters are relatively common in Nigeria due to poor regulatory oversight, the agency said.

Plan International Nigeria, a children’s rights group, called for a government inquiry that ensures “all persons found culpable for dereliction of duties are punished,” the Associated Press reported.

Akinwunmi Ambode, the governor of Lagos State, said the school had been operating illegally in a residential building and most buildings in the area had been marked for demolition, the New York Times reported. But locals blamed the government for failing to carry out those plans – saying that the building had instead recently been refurbished.

B

Those Fearing A Syria-Type Civil War In The US Only Need To Look At South Africa 25 Years Ago

Those Fearing A Syria-Type Civil War In The US Need Only To Look At South Africa 25 Years Ago

    April 29, 1994, was a warm and sunny day in Port Elizabeth South Africa. History was being made that day. South Africa was having its first all-race election. A quarter of a century ago, I was poor with a low-level government job and living in a humble residence. It was a national holiday. I was at home and not working. Around ten in the morning, a 3-Series BMW pulled up near my residence. A Captain in the South African Army got out of the car and came to my door. He had a pronounced Afrikaans accent but told me in English that he was there to take me to vote in this historic election. (How I got to this point is a story for another blog post.) I went with him and got into his car. Police and the army were deployed in large numbers. They feared the worse. I sensed a warm and a relaxed vibe. I was driven to the polling place. I presented my self and was quickly allowed to vote. All the ballots had pictures of the various candidates as many new voters could not read and write. How I voted is private. The army officer returned me to my residence. That evening there was wild euphoria all over South Africa. Nobody in the world can throw a party like South Africans do (of all races.) It was one huge party after another. One African lady said it all as she was being interviewed on South African Broadcasting Commission: “Finally we will be treated as adults and not children.” I had been part of an incredible moment in history.

      There was a lot of fear of widespread election violence and an armed insurrection by the Afrikaans minority. It never materialized. Long before the election, one most-astute South African journalist made the bold prediction that no armed insurrection would come from the Afrikaans population. He made the following comment:

“These people have decent homes and apartments (for the most part.) They eat nice food and drive nice cars. They enjoy their servants and meals out at good restaurants. They are not going to give up their comfortable life to go and fight a hopeless and bloody civil war.”

      His prediction was right.

    Let us “fast forward” 25 years to today in the USA. There is a lot of fear that if Donald Trump is removed from office or voted out of office in 2020, his right wing and well-armed supporters will start an armed civil war like the one going on in Syria. The statistics are frightening. There are between 300,000,000 and 600,000,000 guns in the US. Despite this massive number of guns, 78 % of the American households do not own a gun. This means that 22% of the US households own all this fire power. One could draw the inference that most of this 22% minority are strong Trump supporters. These people include quite a few billionaires who might fund such an armed insurrection. The Fox News network and other right-wing large media owners (Rupert Murdock, for example) would give it strong support. Foreign countries like Saudi Arabia and even Russia might start to support this rebellion. It is a grim future.

      I’m not losing any sleep over this grim possibility. I think back to South Africa 25 years ago and the prophetic words of that one very smart journalist: “They are not going to give up their comfortable lives to participate in a violent civil war they will not win.”

A Trip To Cape Town Not Taken

I'm "Out Of Africa" for 24 years. I was ready to go to Cape Town on Ethiopian Airlines.As I was ready to book the ticket, a voice told me "no." I could have been on the plane that crashed.

By midyear, R3bn Leonardo will eclipse Carlton as SA’s tallest skyscraper

By midyear, R3bn Leonardo will eclipse Carlton as SA’s tallest skyscraper: The view from the top of the Leonardo is quite spectacular, says Legacy Group development director Jamie Hendry. “It really is a 360-degree experience. On a clear day you can see the Magaliesburg mountains and the Voortrekker Monument, in Pretoria, from the north side of the building, and OR Tambo International Airport and Joburg city from the south. At night the sparkle of the city lights are something truly special.”

Democratic Republic Of The Congo-Runaway Outbreak

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

Runaway Outbreak

A deadly outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo shows no signs of slowing, despite the promising antiviral drugs and a vaccine that were not widely available in past epidemics.

Following 907 cases and 569 deaths linked to the disease near the country’s borders with Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda, fears are rising that the epidemic could easily spread to those countries, the New York Times reported.

And those trying to help are a big part of the problem, the paper said, as heavy-handed tactics by the police, military and other organizations have alienated the local people, making them less likely to heed warnings about how the disease is spread.

“The existing atmosphere can only be described as toxic,” Joanne Liu, president of Doctors Without Borders, said at a news conference in Geneva on Thursday.

The result has been more than 30 different incidents and attacks on workers and facilities responding to the outbreak in the last month alone, she said.

Guinea Bissau: The Times Are A Changin'

GUINEA BISSAU

The Times Are A Changin’

The tiny West African country of Guinea-Bissau has been mired in political crises for years.

In 2012, the military seized power in a coup – one of many in the former Portuguese colony’s four decades of independence.

In 2014, President Jose Mario Vaz defeated a military-backed candidate to win office. But since he assumed power, Vaz has fired six prime ministers, including his main political rival, Domingos Simoes Pereira, in 2015. Meanwhile, no president of Guinea-Bissau has finished a full term in the 24 years since the country’s first multi-party elections.

Corruption and drug trafficking are rampant in the impoverished nation. With law and order inhibited, Islamic militants linked to Al Qaeda might be earning money from cocaine trafficking as the drug passes through the country on its way from Latin America to Europe and elsewhere, Bloomberg wrote.

The dismal state of affairs has prevented the United Nations from lifting sanctions on military leaders imposed after the coup,reported Agence France-Presse.

Now things might finally be changing.

After a four-month delay stemming from concerns about hurdles to registering for the ballot, voters are slated to go to the polls to elect new lawmakers on March 10.

“We are going to choose whoever is the best for everyone, so he can govern us,” an unnamed voter told euronews. “Whoever will value us. We don’t want to go through again, what we’ve already been through.”

If the elections take place without serious problems and a presidential election is held later in the year, the UN might rescind its sanctions so the country’s politics can normalize, reportedXinhua, the Chinese newswire.

“It (Guinea-Bissau) has a very high potential in natural resources, agriculture and fisheries, and it could contribute to the economy of West Africa,” wrote PassBlue, a news website that covers the UN.

The country faces a Catch-22, however. Its political and economic institutions are threadbare, issues that in turn undermine faith in the democratic process.

Students, for example, recently staged demonstrations against teacher strikes – a protest against a protest, in other words. One of their main complaints was that political candidates were spending money that could have been used to pay educators.

“They don’t care about us,” said Carlos Badilé, a high school student, in an interview with Agence France-Presse. “All they think about is campaign. Look at all these big cars, these banners deployed all over the country. Don’t you think that the money spent could have taken care of the teachers’ demands?”

One hopes those big cars and banners help elect well-meaning, competent leaders. Time will tell.

Zambia: Prime Time

Prime Time

The Zambian broadcasting authority’s decision to suspend a pro-opposition TV channel just days after the ruling party accused it of bias and unprofessionalism has earned the country a rebuke from Amnesty International.

After Prime TV openly condemned the government of President Edgar Lungu, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) “resolved to suspend (the) license with immediate effect for 30 days,” said IBA board secretary Josephine Mapoma, according to South Africa-based Eyewitness News.

Deprose Muchena, Amnesty International’s regional director for southern Africa, called the move an “unlawful” ploy to “muzzle independent voices in Zambia and to undermine the right to freedom of expression,” according to the rights watchdog’s web site.

The controversy comes amid mounting accusations that Lungu’s government has grown increasingly authoritarian. On Feb. 20, 10 opposition figures threatened to report Lungu to the International Criminal Court in The Hague for allegedly fomenting political violence against his rivals. Meanwhile, the authorities also suspended a local FM radio station for two months on Monday. It had already ordered the closure of The Post newspaper in 2016.

M