Japanese Prime Minister Warns African Countries Against Burdening THeir Countries With Too Much Chinese Debt

JAPAN

The Proverbial Gift Horse

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe cautioned African leaders against burdening their countries with too much debt at a development conference in Japan on Thursday – an implicit reference to China’s big infrastructure projects on the continent.

Abe said Tokyo is promoting “quality” infrastructure exports and investments, supported by Japan’s government-backed institutions at the latest round of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD), according to Agence France-Presse.

“If partner countries are deeply in debt, it interferes with everyone’s efforts to enter the market,” he said.

Abe is working to boost Japan’s presence in Africa to take advantage of growth opportunities there. However, Japanese businesses remain wary of financial and security risks, while China has already built a massive presence despite criticism for importing Chinese workers, ignoring human rights and environmental concerns, and burdening countries with unsupportable debts.

Last year, for instance, China announced $60 billion in development funding for Africa, twice as much as Japan pledged at the last TICAD meeting in 2016.

Burkina Faso: A Rising Emergency

BURKINA FASO

A Rising Emergency

Islamist extremists killed at least 24 soldiers in northern Burkina Faso in one of the deadliest such attacks ever to hit the West African nation, President Roch Marc Christian Kabore said Tuesday.

“It is a record that saddens us both at the level of the people of Burkina Faso in general, and at the level of the government in particular,” Kabore said, the Associated Press reported.

Seven more soldiers were wounded and another five are missing, according to Al Jazeera.

So far, the country has not identified a particular group as the perpetrators, but a source in the security establishment told AFP that it appeared to be a “well-prepared” and “coordinated” assault by a heavily armed force.

Extremist violence has been increasing in Burkina Faso, where such attacks have already killed hundreds of people and prompted thousands more to flee their homes. The government declared a state of emergency last year, and in May Kabore’s foreign minister warned that the problem is growing throughout the Sahel region, which includes Mali, Niger and Chad, and could soon destabilize West Africa.

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South Africa: A History of Taking

SOUTH AFRICA

A History of Taking

Demonstrators sporting socialist slogans took to the streets of South Africa last month. “Yes to land expropriation without compensation!” read one demonstrator’s sign in a photo with this BBC article.

The protesters’ demands reflected frustration with the lack of progress in redistributing property since the end of apartheid, the white supremacist system of segregation that prevailed in South Africa through 1994.

Land reform is a huge issue in South Africa. One set of statistics says that whites represent 9 percent of the country’s population but hold 72 percent of the land that is owned by individuals. Agence France-Presse provided some context, breaking down the history and complicated claims on land that might have been seized under a colonial regime and then passed through many hands over the years.

The country’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, had promised to redistribute some wrongfully taken land to citizens. But few such transfers have actually happened.

President Cyril Ramaphosa recently empaneled a commission to investigate the issue. The panel recommended seizing land, in some cases, without paying the owner. Those cases include “abandoned land” and “land held purely for speculative purposes,” Radio France Internationale explained.

RFI noted that Ramaphosa appointed the panel under pressure from the Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left political party that has been attacking the slow progress of the ruling African National Congress.

A majority on the panel also recommended a constitutional amendment to clarify that the grounds for seizures without compensation must be limited. They certainly had Zimbabwe on their minds. Former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe tried expropriation but set in motion a downward economic spiral that eventually led his allies to oust him from office.

Panel member Dan Kriek, president of a group representing commercial farmers, argued against a constitutional change. “I do believe that if we go the way of amending the constitution, we will do much harm to our economy,” he said. “We will not get foreign investment. We will see inward and external investment drying up as the levels of uncertainty will increase.”

Analysts writing for the Daily Maverick were skeptical about whether Ramaphosa and his allies could pull off even unambitious land reforms, with or without taking someone’s homestead on the veldt. Corruption riddles South Africa’s cash-starved government.

Indeed, South Africa’s credit rating is junk. “South Africa isn’t benefiting from the global hunt for yield,” Bloomberg understatedly reported. The country’s anti-corruption watchdog recently accused Ramaphosa of money laundering and misleading parliament about campaign contributions. Luckily for him, Al Jazeera reported, a court recently issued an order to forestall prosecution until he has time to appeal.

South African society is straining. Gun-related crime is surging in the cultural capital of Cape Town, swamping emergency rooms, for example, wrote the Independent Online, a local news outlet in the city.

Governing with justice requires a difficult balancing act between pressing needs. Unfortunately, time is running out as people lose patience.

Zimbabwe-Pre-emptive Strike

ZIMBABWE

Pre-emptive Strike

A coalition of human rights groups said armed men kidnapped six Zimbabwean political activists from their homes and beat them up in an effort to quash a planned protest by the main opposition party on Friday.

The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, a coalition of rights groups, said it suspected state security agents were behind the abductions, Reuters reported.

“Zimbabwe’s fundamental freedoms are once again in danger and this must be stopped before it gets out of control,” Jestina Mukoko, who chairs the forum, told reporters.

Friday’s protests have been called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), which still disputes the legitimacy of Emmerson Mnangagwa’s presidential election win last year. However, the specific issue they’re targeting is the dismal state of the economy.

Mnangagwa’s government blamed the incident on a “third force” comprising supporters of former leader Robert Mugabe, though it said police would conduct a full investigation.

The MDC has vowed that the protests will be peaceful, but the authorities fear a repeat of the violence that broke out in January over a steep hike in fuel prices.

Niger: On The Edge

NIGER

On the Edge

In 2017, jihadist militants ambushed a unit of American special forces in Niger. The Pentagon recently issued a report blaming junior officers for the incident that resulted in the deaths of four soldiers, the New York Times wrote.

Since then, however, the security situation has deteriorated not only in the impoverished, largely Muslim West African country, but also in neighboring Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali and Nigeria. Militants linked to al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other groups have been launching attacks throughout the region, echoing their international approach to destabilizing the Middle East, Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou noted recently.

Now, Niger could become the lynchpin in the fight against Islamic extremism in the Sahel region of western Africa, which Islamic State views as a potential replacement for its fallen “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, the Economist reported.

“Niger’s ability to hold firm against jihadists will not only determine its own future stability; it will shape the future of militancy in the broader region and either deny or provide foreign forces the opportunity to use Niger as a stable base in their counterterrorism fight,” wrote Strator, a think tank, in a recent report.

Issoufou wants action.

“I propose an international coalition, like you see in Syria or Iraq, to fight terrorism in the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin,” Issoufou toldBloomberg. “When I say an international force, this also includes the US.”

The problem is, foreign troops are already fighting in the region. The US has deployed forces. France is fighting in Mali. Ivory Coast and Ghana have also bolstered their security, expecting tougher times ahead. It’s hard to see what else outsiders might do.

Analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, another think tank, believe more troops might be necessary. But if the US and others opt to enlarge their militaries’ footprints in Niger and the Sahel, they’ll need to do a better job of curbing civilian casualties and boosting political processes that might weaken the militants in the first place, the center’s analysts wrote in a recent brief.

Those suggestions reflect the dire conditions in Niger and surrounding areas: Almost 10 million people in the region are “food insecure,” according to the United Nations. Around 2 million children are at risk of acute malnutrition.

The forthcoming African Continental Free Trade Area might help the Sahel’s economy, Al Jazeera noted. China is already planning to build a pipeline to help landlocked Niger export oil, Reuters added.

Those projects are a start. They won’t take off, however, if fanatics are in control.

Nigeria: Waiting For Godot

NIGERIA

Waiting for Godot

Armed men on motorbikes attacked a funeral procession in northeastern Nigeria recently, killing at least 65 people. Dozens are still missing.

The attack, blamed on the Islamic militant group Boko Haram, was thought to be a reprisal in a tit-for-tat conflict that has taken hold of the region, including remote areas of Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Cows are a mainstay of the local economy in northeastern Nigeria. The mourners were villagers fed up with Boko Haram’s cattle rustling. Sick of waiting for the government to take action, they formed a militia to fight the group. Villagers recently won a skirmish, killing 11 Boko Haram fighters and seizing their automatic weapons.

“These people have been stealing from us so we decided to come together because we could no longer wait for an eternity for soldiers to defend us,” Aji Gaji Mallam told the New York Times.

Mallam was present at the funeral attack. He survived by pretending that he was dead for three hours. Four of Mallam’s brothers had died in previous Boko Haram assaults.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack and called for a manhunt, reported Reuters.

Few appear to have much confidence in Buhari, who won office in 2015 on promises to defeat Boko Haram but nonetheless began his second term in office in May amid “a tense backdrop of insecurity and economic uncertainty,” CNN wrote.

The militant group has been active for 10 years now.

In a video about the roots of Boko Haram, the BBC described how the 2009 death in police custody of the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf, led to a continuing campaign of terror that has killed 30,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.

The group made headlines in 2014 when militants kidnapped 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok. The pace of incidents has been relatively steady since then. Earlier this year, for example, Boko Haram-related violence displaced 30,000 people in two days.

“It has been 10 years. We are still waiting – endlessly optimistic but tragically traumatized,” local photographer Fati Abubakar told Al Jazeera. “We have waited and waited and waited for Boko Haram to end.”

Nigeria is a land of contrasts. It has enormous oil wealth. But its people are impoverished amid rampant corruption. It faces problems Americans can understand: Some fear, for example, the role that fake news spread on WhatsApp might play in elections, Quartz noted. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported on how open defecation is a major public health challenge in the remote state of Kano.

Nobody can deal with real problems while maniacs are running loose.

Egypt: Death On The Nile

EGYPT

Death on the Nile

Authorities on Monday blamed a terror group with links to the Muslim Brotherhood for a car bomb in Cairo that killed at least 20.

The blast Sunday night hit Corniche boulevard along the Nile River, setting other cars ablaze and injuring at least 47 more people, the Associated Press reported. The explosion also shattered parts of the façade of Egypt’s main cancer hospital and damaged some rooms inside, forcing the evacuation of dozens of patients, the agency said.

Having at first attributed the incident to a multi-vehicle accident, the Interior Ministry accused a militant group called Hasm, which has links to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, of responsibility once it acknowledged the blast as a terrorist attack.

Though smaller bombings have taken place fairly often in the intervening period, the explosion was the deadliest such attack to hit Cairo since the December 2016 bombing of a chapel near Egypt’s main Coptic Christian cathedral, which killed 30 people during Sunday Mass.

That incident was claimed by an Egyptian affiliate of Islamic State.

Mocambique: Hug It Out

MOZAMBIQUE

Hug It Out

Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi enveloped Ossufo Momade, the leader of the country’s main opposition party Renamo, in a bear hug Thursday after they inked an agreement to end the decades of strife that have followed the country’s 15-year civil war.

“We are living in a moment of hope. This is the moment of our reconciliation,” President Filipe Nyusi told a cheering crowd in Gorongosa National Park, which was formerly a rebel stronghold and hotspot in the fighting, the Associated Press reported.

Nyusi and Momade agreed to a permanent cease-fire following years of negotiations to end sporadic fighting that has waxed and waned since the civil war ended in 1992.

More than 5,200 rebel fighters are now disarming, with a national election on the horizon. The hope is that burying the hatchet will allow the economy to grow and bring a measure of prosperity to a country where nearly three-quarters of the population survives on less than $2 a day.

There have been similar efforts in the past, but this time an amnesty for rebel fighters and other key measures were implemented before the actual signing – spurring optimism that the peace may hold.