A Famine In Madagascar

 

MADAGASCAR

A Land of No Yield

Hungry people in Madagascar are eating raw cactus fruit, leaves and locusts to survive the country’s worst famine since the early 1980s.

A woman identified as Tamaria who lives in Amboasary on the African island’s southern coast told the World Food Program that she was growing weaker and more desperate as she saw fewer options to feed herself or her seven children.

“I have no land so I cannot cultivate anything,” said the woman who lives in a 16-square-foot bamboo hut. “We live on wild tubers like fangitse and the red cactus in the forest. We sold all our domestic goods, including spoons. If we find green vegetables and want to cook them, for example, we need to borrow pots from other people. I have nothing left and it is painful.”

Around 400,000 people are facing starvation, the Associated Press reported. Another 14,000 are dealing with catastrophic food conditions. Those numbers are expected to increase significantly over the next few months unless the international community takes action.

Africans often face such harrowing circumstances when their countries are embroiled in violence – civil war, rebellions, terrorism and other phenomena can obviously hamper farming and food distribution. Madagascar has suffered those troubles.

But climate change is to blame for this famine.

As the Washington Post explained, five of the last six rainy seasons have delivered less rainfall than average, hurting agriculture. As a result, dust storms known locally as “tiomena” as well as locust swarms have become more common, further reducing or flat-out ruining harvests.

Malagasies live in crushing poverty – two-thirds earn less than $1.90 a day. Many depend on foraging in the wild for their nutritional needs. Those resources are under threat, too. Writing in the Conversation, University of Cape Town Postdoctoral Fellow Estelle Razanatsoa noted that the Covid-19 pandemic had set back the conservation efforts that were attempting to help local people stop deforestation and other trends that hurt food resources.

The government has responded by accepting humanitarian aid and jailing journalists who draw attention to the problem.

Reporters Without Borders recently condemned Malagasy officials for smearing French journalist Gaëlle Borgia for releasing video footage of hungry citizens. Last year, Borgia and the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for covering Russian meddling in the country’s elections in 2018.

The winner of that election, Andry Rajoelina, who has come under fire for hawking an herbal remedy for Covid-19, recently took $40 million from the US to help fight hunger, a US Embassy press released showed. Many wonder where it’s going.

Regardless, memories of hunger and hardship will linger, alongside his legacy.

South Africa Is Falling Apart

 

SOUTH AFRICA

Sparking Tinder

The BBC video of a woman throwing her baby out of a burning building illustrates the violence and suffering that has racked South Africa in recent weeks. The baby and mother survived the fire, which looters lit amid widespread civil unrest.

The violence erupted in early July after former President Jacob Zuma began a 15-month prison term for contempt of court, the Associated Press explained. His supporters in KwaZulu-Natal, where he is from, erected roadblocks and burned trucks in protest. More than 300 people died, according to Agence France-Presse. Police arrested more than 2,500 people on theft and vandalism charges.

The riots were the worst since the end of South Africa’s racist, segregationist Apartheid regime in 1994. Private citizens took up arms to defend their business and critical infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. Protesters destroyed 100 mobile phone towers, prompting the South African telecommunications regulator to issue a public call for citizens to guard facilities.

Zuma was convicted on corruption charges. The scandals plaguing him include $20 million in security upgrades for his private compound. A court recently granted his request for a delay in a corruption trial involving kickbacks in a $2 billion arms deal, Reuters reported. He also faces corruption, fraud and money laundering charges.

Regardless, it’s hard to tell if the riots and looting were unrest or an insurrection, as Foreign Policy magazine wrote.

President Cyril Ramaphosa and others claim that Zuma’s allies planned the violence. A Zuma-allied faction of the ruling African National Congress called the Radical Economic Transformation orchestrated the riots because they benefitted from the patronage and corruption that was endemic to Zuma’s regime, argued journalist Benjamin Fogel in an Al Jazeera opinion piece.

But while political affiliation explains how the protests and looting began, other factors clarify why they grew out of control.

Officially, nearly one-third of South Africans are unemployed – that number almost doubles if counting only those younger than 35. Half the country lives in poverty. More than 20 percent lack sufficient food. Inequality, meanwhile, is rampant. The coronavirus hasn’t improved these numbers, of course.

Sello Kgoale, 46, had never stolen anything before. He couldn’t resist pilfering rice, cooking oil and paraffin from a local mall after his neighbors told him that the police weren’t stopping looters.

“I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m ashamed,” Kgoale said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, relating how successive waves of the coronavirus killed his aged relatives, rendered him unemployed and ruined his chances of launching a new business. “But we just keep getting hit.”

Lack of economic opportunities, not politics, led Kgoale to break the law. Some wonder about Zuma’s excuse.

W

Political Violence In SOuth Africa After Jacob Zuma Is Jailed

 

SOUTH AFRICA

Apartheid Redux

South Africa is dealing with the worst political violence it has seen since the end of apartheid three decades ago, with deadly riots and looting sparked by the arrest of former President Jacob Zuma, CBS News reported Wednesday.

Officials said that at least 72 people have died over the past week.

Meanwhile, arrests have topped 1,000 while more than 600 stores have been looted: The unrest has crippled KwaZulu-Natal and parts of Johannesburg and blockaded major supply routes, resulting in fuel and food shortages in those areas, according to the Washington Post.

The violence began when Zuma was jailed for refusing to appear before a commission investigating corruption during his nine years in office.

Zuma’s supporters took to the streets in protests, but the demonstrations soon devolved into riots fueled by ongoing poverty that has been worsened by the coronavirus pandemic.

Authorities, meanwhile, are probing whether former officials affiliated with the ex-president are involved in instigating the violence.

Still, political analyst Ralph Mathekga blamed South Africa’s economic woes, unemployment and inequality for the violence.

“It is simply feedback (reflecting the) discontent,” he said.

J

France's Role In West Africa

 

WEST AFRICA

The Hardest Word

President Emmanuel Macron recently apologized for his country’s role in the massacre of thousands of Rwandans in the 1990s when Paris supported the African country’s murderous regime. “In ignoring the warnings of the most clear-sighted observers…France bore damning responsibility in a chain of events that led to the worst,” he said, asking for forgiveness, according to the Economist.

The mea culpa underscores France’s attempted reset in Africa.

More concretely, Macron is also pulling back on France’s military presence on the continent, especially in Mali and surrounding nations where the former colonial power has long dispatched troops in the name of stability, the Washington Post reported. In recent years, French, as well as American and other Western troops, have been fighting militants affiliated with al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Writing in the Conversation, King’s College London doctoral candidate Folahanmi Aina saw the pullout as a chance to develop new ways to assist the region. If France and others could help develop good governance in the region – functional executive and legislative branches, courts and other institutions, for instance – then they could break the cycle that leads to violence, he argued.

But others see a disaster in the making as weak governments face off against Islamist militants. Macron is eyeing the withdrawal of more than 5,000 troops from Mali and the region. That followed the dismay over a recent coup he suggested could result in new leaders with Islamist views, Voice of America reported.

Meanwhile, nearby Burkina Faso has already seen villages descend into lawlessness when the French troops depart, Al Jazeera noted. The situation is so dire that thousands hit the streets in protest over the weekend, demanding the government step up, Africanews reported.

Such fears are one reason that American officials have not been quick to support French efforts to expand United Nations forces in the region to replace departing French soldiers, Foreign Policy magazine wrote.

Still, Macron is answering the demands of the French public, which is sick of the country’s overseas adventures. The war against terror has created tensions in secular France, too.

France is among the most hated countries among radical Islamists, VICE News wrote. Islamist terror attacks have killed scores in France while far-right French politicians cite the violence as evidence for stricter policies against non-French (read: Islamic) influences in society. The gulf, some say, is widening because of these policy moves. One notable exception is in the French military, the New York Times noted, where Muslim soldiers are well integrated.

Regardless, moves big and small will be necessary for France to turn the page on this episode in its history abroad, and the repercussions at home.