Friday, June 24, 2022

Pre Historic Copy Cats In Africa

DISCOVERIES

Prehistoric Copycats

The early human ancestors in Africa were sharing knowledge and communicating across vast distances more than 60,000 years ago, according to a recent study.

A research team discovered that the early Homo sapiens made a 65,000-year-old stone tool in exactly the same shape and using the same template across various sites in southern Africa, the Guardian reported.

Known as a “stone Swiss Army knife,” the multipurpose tool was used for a variety of things, including cutting, drilling and skinning.

Lead author Amy Way explained that because the tools look identical across different sites, it shows that ancient humans had strong communications networks and shared knowledge with each other.

She noted that these artifacts were found on sites that are 1,200 kilometers apart – more than 700 miles.

“One hundred kilometers takes five days to walk, so it’s probably a whole network of groups that (were) mostly in contact with the neighboring group,” Way said.

Way and her team added that the findings also suggest that these long-distance networks existed just before our ancestors decided to migrate in large numbers out of Africa some 60,000 to 70,000 years ago.

“The main theory is that social networks were stronger at this time,” she added. “This analysis shows for the first time that these social connections were in place in southern Africa just before the big exodus.”

South Africa-Broken And Betrayed!!!!!

Broken and Betrayed

SOUTH AFRICA

A years-long judicial reckoning of corruption during the tenure of former South African President Jacob Zuma ended this week, prompting questions over whether the government will prosecute individuals who stole more than $31 billion from state coffers, Bloomberg reported.

The 5,000-page report showed a web of graft that stretched from the national power and rail utilities to Zuma and his cabinet. Chief Justice Raymond Zondo – who headed the inquiry – recommended the prosecutions of numerous officials starting from former heads of state companies to government ministers.

Still, since it began four years ago, the “Zondo commission” – as it’s colloquially known in the country – has only made a handful of arrests with many individuals accused of wrongdoing continuing to hold senior government positions.

Zondo said that President Cyril Rampahosa and the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party have done little to tackle corruption, both during Zuma’s rule and following his resignation in 2018 amid corruption allegations. The judge held the party responsible for keeping Zuma in power and looting billions from taxpayers.

Analysts said that Zondo’s findings highlight how the South African government has become “a broken institution in itself.”

The findings have portrayed the ANC and President Cyril Ramaphosa in a negative light. Elections are still two years away, however.

The ruling party responded that Zondo’s report will help “enhance the process of fundamental renewal and rebuilding within our movement.” Even so, political observers and the public remain skeptical that authorities will take any action or fix the damage wrought to the country during the Zuma years.

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

A Massacre In Ethiopia

Suffer the Many

ETHIOPIA

Gunmen killed more than 200 people in Ethiopia’s Oromia region this week as the country continues to grapple with rising ethnic tensions, the Associated Press reported.

Witnesses counted about 230 bodies, saying most of them were members of the ethnic Amhara community that moved to the region about three decades ago as the result of a resettlement program

Following the attack, the community is now trying to relocate “before another round of mass killings happen,” according to witnesses.

Officials and witnesses blamed the Oromo Liberation Army for the slaughter but the rebel group denied the allegations. It countered that Ethiopian soldiers and local militias conducted the attacks on the local population “as retaliation for their perceived support for the OLA.”

The recent massacre comes as Africa’s second-most populous country faces rising ethnic tensions mainly fueled by historical grudges and political tensions. The Amhara people, Ethiopia’s second-largest ethnic group, have been targeted frequently in regions like Oromia.

On Sunday, the government-appointed Ethiopian Human Rights Commission urged the federal government to find a “lasting solution” to the killing of civilians and to safeguard them from such attacks.

South Africa-Country First

Country First

SOUTH AFRICA

At a recent demonstration against foreigners in South Africa, Mary Lowe said she was marching because an undocumented immigrant killed her nephew. “We are basically fighting against all the crime committed by foreigners who are illegally in the country,” Lowe, a member of the anti-immigrant group Operation Dudula, which means “force out” in the Zulu language, told National Public Radio. “We’ve got our own criminals here. Our hands are already full.”

Operation members conduct “blitzes” in neighborhoods where they suspect illegal immigrants might be residing or working, noted the Witness, a South Africa-based outlet. Grilling potential undocumented folks on the street, they apprehend them before bringing them to the police.

Immigrants don’t necessarily commit more crimes than native-born South Africans, say critics. But violent crime, already historically high in South Africa relative to other countries, has spiked recently, Africanews wrote. In the first three months of 2022, murders rose by more than 20 percent, including a nearly 40 percent surge in child deaths, compared to last year. Kidnappings more than doubled. Sexual crimes increased by almost 14 percent.

Economic conditions aren’t helping. As the South African publication BusinessTech explained, the country’s gross domestic product had recouped what had been lost during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. Ordinary South Africans, however, are nonetheless poorer. Recent growth hasn’t trickled down.

Writing in the Conversation, University of the Western Cape Economist Johannes P S Sheefeni noted that “lackluster economic growth, growing inflation and very high unemployment” typify the South African economy. Civil unrest and violence, unsurprisingly, are the result. He fears more trouble is on the way as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drives food and energy prices higher.

Xenophobia is not a new phenomenon in South Africa, the Washington Post added. In 2008, for example, attackers killed 62 suspected illegal residents in Johannesburg. At the foundation of these troubles, however, are South Africans’ perceptions of their lot since the end of Apartheid in the early 1990s. Rather than inaugurating peace and prosperity, the end of White minority rule has undercut public safety and created economic precariousness.

Zimbabwe-born writer Ndaba Sibanda went further. In an opinion column in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, he argued that views originating in the colonial era when Britain and the Dutch ruled the region, are behind Operation Dudula. Why else would Black South Africans be condemning other Black Africans with whom they share cultural ties? The divisions sown in the 19th century when Europeans drew the region’s borders on a map are still influencing people’s minds today, he said.

Some South Africans have embraced this perspective, as the Christian Science Monitor showed.

Others still believe they’d be better off without some of their neighbors.

Friday, June 17, 2022

Climate Change And Africa

No Place Like Home

AFRICA

Khady Sene, 53, has a problem – rising seawater claimed her ancestral home in Saint-Louis, Senegal four years ago. It happened to be located on the Atlantic coast of the country, a place the United Nations has determined is the most threatened by climate change on the continent.

Now she has become a climate refugee.

That’s because even though the Senegalese government wants to relocate Sene and her neighbors into new properties, they refuse to give up their homes.

“They can move us,” Sene told the Washington Post, “but they cannot move our spirits.”

She’s not alone. Millions of people across Africa are becoming refugees due to climate change. Fleeing their homes and living itinerantly not because of war or economic collapse, this new kind of refugee is seeking hospitable regions of the planet.

As the International Rescue Committee explained, the Covid-19 pandemic, ongoing local conflicts, droughts, especially bad swarms of desert locusts, and food and energy price hikes due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine are precipitating a humanitarian catastrophe in the Horn of Africa.

These disasters cause social friction. In South Africa, after attacks on refugees and migrants amid an influx of newcomers, a Catholic bishop called on his congregants to treat their fellow humans with compassion. He stressed to them that climate change was part of the bundle of misfortunes that were bringing people to the country, added Crux.

The lengths people will go to escape inhospitable environments are great. Osman Ali fled Somalia, for instance, when the Shabelle River ran dry, wrote Bloomberg. When his sheep and goats were “skin and bones” and his crops wilted, he sold his land and traveled to Brazil. From there, he journeyed to Mexico intending to cross the US border.

Still, many refugees who might be classified as fleeing war might not have taken to the road if not for climate change, reported Fronteras, a special project of Arizona news station KJZZ. Accordingly, activists are pressuring US officials to treat climate refugees as such, too, wrote Inside Climate News.

Diplomats now say that climate change is a “threat multiplier” for other international crises, as the UN noted. As the Guardian wrote in relation to Ethiopians crossing the border into Somaliland to flee their civil war, for example, refugees might seek to escape bullets only to encounter starvation when they find a safe haven from violence.

If this problem grows, the instability could be monumental.

Monday, June 6, 2022

President Ramaphosa's Watergate Moment???

Editor's notebook

		ADRIAAN BASSON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Is this Ramaphosa's Nixon moment?

It has been said that it wasn't the Watergate scandal as such that brought former US president Richard Nixon to a fall, but his attempts to cover up the scandal.

I thought about this as I read former spy boss Arthur Fraser's astonishing affidavit over the weekend, in which he accuses President Cyril Ramaphosa of money laundering, corruption and kidnapping.

The story sounds almost fantastical and, to be fair to Ramaphosa, at this stage it is still only Fraser's version under oath that is known. But the fact that Fraser stated his version under oath (you go to jail if you lie under oath), and that the details were clearly leaked from within Ramaphosa's protection unit, means we can and should view it in a serious light.

I have read Fraser's affidavit. Three times. And every time I came back to paragraph 13.29.

"Major General [Wally] Rhoode and his team, on the instruction of President Ramaphosa, paid Mr Shaumbwako, Mr Muhekeni, Mr Shikongo, Mr David and Mr Afrikaner R150 000 each in cash to conceal the events that took place at Phala Phala on 9 February 2020."

This stung. The italics are mine. Fraser has told the police there is evidence of the president instructing his head of security to conceal a crime of which he was a victim by paying off the alleged criminals to keep their mouths shut.

If I was Ramaphosa's lawyers, this part would concern me the most. Why did Ramaphosa allegedly want to keep the existence of the crime secret? What was it about the crime that he didn't want the world to know? Why on earth would a victim of crime pay the perpetrators to keep quiet? Is it the cover-up that will sink Ramaphosa?

But first some context.

State Security Agency corruption

It is important to remember that Chief Justice Raymond Zondo is apparently about to drop his report into corruption at the State Security Agency and that this will not be happy reading for Fraser.

The former spy boss was accused, also under oath, at the Zondo Commission of overseeing the large-scale looting of the SSA for political and personal enrichment. It is entirely possible that this was Fraser's last, desperate attempt to show the world Ramaphosa is not as squeaky clean as he pretends to be, or to force the government into some underhanded deal to leave him alone if he leaves Ramaphosa alone.

Irrespective of Fraser's motives - and that is not irrelevant but should be investigated and adjudicated on its own - the very serious claims against the president and his security establishment should be thoroughly investigated.

It is also no surprise that dirt is thrown at Ramaphosa as he prepares to campaign for re-election at the ANC's elective conference in December. At this stage, potentially his biggest competitor is a man who is himself embroiled in a corruption scandal: Zweli Mkhize.

What better ammunition for the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) grouping in the ANC, who are sympathetic to former president Jacob Zuma and will be supporting Mkhize to topple Ramaphosa.

Again, all of the above may be true, but it remains critically important that the allegations against the president be thoroughly investigated by an independent police.

Rhoode

Which brings me to Rhoode; the head of Ramaphosa's presidential protection unit. I first encountered him in 2009 as head of security for the local organising committee of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. At the time, Rhoode was already embroiled in a scandal about a security tender awarded by the National Prosecuting Authority when he was the NPA's security head.

Rhoode left the LOC under a cloud after being accused of awarding tenders to ANC buddies and was shortly thereafter charged with corruption for the NPA tender matter. The case was finally dropped after the main witness died.

A former uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) cadre, Rhoode is close to Marion Sparg, the NPA's former CEO and another ex-MK fighter. Sparg is a close ally of Ramaphosa who was intimately involved in his campaign for election as ANC president in 2017.

It is understood that she brought Rhoode into Ramaphosa's CR17 campaign. After being elected president, and despite his absence of top security clearance, Rhoode made a stunning comeback in the civil service as head of the presidential protection unit at the rank of Major-General.

The mind boggles. How did Ramaphosa allow this man to be his closest protector and oversee his entire security establishment? At the same time as keeping Fraser on as head of correctional services?

Ramaphosa says he instructed Rhoode to investigate the burglary at his farm and Rhoode himself has thus far declined to respond to Fraser's affidavit.

Irrespective of what the police find in their investigation, what this episode has also shown us is Ramaphosa's astonishing naivety in allowing himself to by surrounded by people with chequered pasts. At some point those bad decisions were going to bite. That moment has arrived.

Sunday, June 5, 2022

The President Of South Africa Just Got "hit" For $4 Million US!!!!

Ramaphosa farm theft: Money stolen from game farm the earnings from private sales, transactions

Kyle Cowan and Qaanitah Hunter

07:33

President Cyril Ramaphosa

PHOTO: Jeffrey Abrahams, Gallo Images

President Cyril Ramaphosa has confirmed cash was stolen from a farm he owns in Limpopo.
While the true amount is yet to be disclosed, former spy boss Arthur Fraser has alleged more than US$4 million was taken and recovered.
The confirmation of the theft has raised serious questions around the nature of large cash transactions involving Ramaphosa's businesses.

The money stolen from President Cyril Ramaphosa's game farm in Limpopo was not the earnings from one of the many lucrative auctions of rare game in the province, but that of a deal between the president and private breeders or investors.

The president's spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told News24 the money was paid to Ramaphosa by buyers who visited the farm, Phala Phala, "from time to time".

Ramaphosa is a regular participant in game auctions in Limpopo where breeders of exotic game bid millions of rand on various animals in what has become a lucrative industry.

"This is what happens since the president owns and runs a game breeding farm. In the normal course of some operations, clients will come in and out, look at game, and buy game, that's just a normal thing.

"During this particular time, the transactions were not necessarily from an auction, it was just a transaction that took place at the farm. And there were some cash payments made - some clients would use the normal banking platforms, others would pay cash.

"So, once that cash is received it will then get managed accordingly against the invoices raised and so on," Magwenya said.

READ | Presidency confirms robbery at Ramaphosa's farm, but there's 'no basis for claims of criminal conduct'

Ramaphosa is an avid game breeder and seller with large transactions over the years making headlines - just last month one of his prize Ankole bulls, Mufasa, sold for R700 000 at auction. Over the years, the auction of game has netted Ramaphosa's farms millions.

The president owns two farms - the 5 000-hectare Ntaba Nyoni in Mpumalanga, and between 2011 and 2014 he bought 4 500 hectares of farmland near Bela-Bela in Limpopo, Phala Phala, where rare antelope, cattle and buffalo are bred.

These estates seemed to be worth in excess of R100 million, according to the deeds office.

Phala Phala is part of the Stud Game Breeders, a group of breeders that include Ramaphosa, former SAB chief executive Norman Adami, Jacques Malan, Tony and Richard Morton as well as Johan and Nadien Bosch.

Auctions of buffalo and other game by these breeders often fetch record prices. They all pride themselves on breeding outstanding and often rare, disease-free animals to be sold in a competitive market.

Phala Phala's general manager, Hendrik von Wielligh, would not venture into detail when contacted by phone on Thursday, saying only it was not unheard of for transactions to be in cash, although the majority of deals were done through bank transfers.

He would not be drawn on the identity of the cash buyer, saying he would rather let police enquiries take their course.

A well-placed source in Limpopo with working knowledge of events at Phala Phala indicated the money was seemingly related to a foreign investor and buyer.

News24 was not able to confirm the exact amount of cash that was taken, or if it was in rands or dollars.

Confirmation from the Presidency on Thursday that money was stolen during a robbery at his farm in Limpopo in February 2020 has raised serious questions over the apparent inflow of large amounts of cash into Ramaphosa's game breeding ventures.

On Wednesday, former State Security Agency (SSA) director-general Arthur Fraser issued a press statement alleging that on 9 February 2020, a burglary took place at the Limpopo farm, and according to him, roughly US$4 million in cash was taken.

He opened a case at the Rosebank police station, claiming Ramaphosa had hidden the incident from police and the taxman, and according to the statement, had provided police with video evidence of the theft.

Fraser alleged the suspects were caught, kidnapped and interrogated, and he believed crimes of defeating the ends of justice, kidnapping and money laundering were committed.

Police spokesperson Colonel Athlenda Mathe confirmed a case had been registered and "due processes" would follow.

Magwenya issued a statement on Thursday, confirming the incident but denied Fraser's claims.

He said the "proceeds from the sale of game were stolen".

The auction of cattle was halted by the government between 2019 and mid-February 2020 due to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. The robbery took place just days before the government lifted the ban.

Red flags

The president's confirmation that cash was stolen immediately has raised concerns.

One forensic expert, a senior executive at a respected forensic law firm who asked not to be named so he could speak freely, said money laundering in the wildlife trade was an area South Africa needed to address.

"At the moment, there is a broader problem for South Africa, we have been criticised in our latest mutual evaluation with the Financial Action Task Force [FATF] for not doing enough to tackle money laundering. The trade in wildlife and casinos has been specifically highlighted as areas that are open to abuse," they said.

"This is an issue for government to clamp down on and address, because it is creating concerns on the part of the FATF regarding compliance with the recommendations. The report was quite scathing."

Another leading figure in agriculture with extensive knowledge of the wildlife industry said cash transactions were common, with auctions mostly being online and widespread suspicion that money laundering could play a role in some transactions.

WATCH | 'I've not stolen taxpayers' money' - Ramaphosa claims innocence amid farm burglary chargesPresident Cyril Ramaphosa has insisted that the money stolen from his farm were not proceeds of crime.

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Concerned

A source close to the president's security detail told News24 Ramaphosa was first concerned about a security breach at his farm, but did not know money was stolen from the premises.

At first, there was concern about the wellbeing of the animals on the farm given the fact he owns breeding buffalos worth millions.

The insider said only weeks later after the African Union Summit and State of the Nation Address in Parliament, did the president realise the money was stolen.

The well-placed source noted Major-General Wally Rhoode, the head of Ramaphosa's VIP Protection Unit, immediately began an investigation into the matter.

READ | Ramaphosa set for another second term nod as VBS scandal haunts ANC Limpopo conference

"The farm was not under the care of the presidential protection unit. Ramaphosa didn't want us to install security there because of what happened at Nkandla. So, after this incident we had to secure the farm," the insider said.

Two sources close to the Union Buildings added they believed Fraser overstated the amount of money stolen from the premises.

Ramaphosa's allies believe Fraser’s accusations were a red herring amid talks of looming criminal charges against him and a close confidante at the SSA.

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