News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

Cecil the lion's BFF Jericho dies

Posted: 01 Nov 2016 12:10 AM PDT

Jericho, the lion that had formed a bond with Cecil - a lion killed in an illegal hunt in 2015 - has been found dead.

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Harare - Jericho, the lion that had formed a bond with Cecil - a lion killed in an illegal hunt in 2015 - has been found dead in the Hwange National Park, a wildlife official said on Monday.

Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority spokesperson Caroline Washaya-Moyo told Xinhua that Jericho's carcass was found on Saturday.

"Jericho was found dead in the Kennedy area which was his territory. It is suspected that he could have died on October 27. 2016," she said. The death has been attributed to natural causes.

Although widely reputed to have been Cecil's brother, wildlife experts said Jericho was not, but had formed a co-operative coalition with Cecil in order to better compete with other males for both territories and prides.

Cecil, 13, was a major attraction in Hwange and was being studied and tracked by the University of Oxford. He was killed with bow and arrow in July 2015 by an American dentist in an incident that provoked international outrage and raised debate on trophy hunting.

US authorities later added two subspecies of lion, in India and western and central Africa, to the endangered species list, including Cecil's species, thus making it more difficult for US citizens to kill these lions.

A report by Andrew Loveridge and Jane Hunt of Hwange Lion Research said Jericho's carcass had been discovered at about 5pm local time during routine monitoring of collared lions by the Hwange Lion Research Project. Jericho had been fitted with a GPS collar on July 5, 2016.

The team did not see any evidence to suggest that the lion had died due to any kind of traumatic injury such as gunshot, snare and wounds from fighting and did not appear to have struggled prior to death.

A post-mortem was done and it is believed that the death was due to natural causes.

"This is very feasible because the lion was 12 and-a-half years of age (born June 2004) at the time of death, which is old for a male lion living in the wild," the report said.

The skull was removed from the carcass for safekeeping while the remains were buried at the site.

Xinhua

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Nigeria to probe alleged rapes by army, police

Posted: 31 Oct 2016 12:06 PM PDT

Nigeria's president has ordered an investigation into allegations that 43 women and girls fleeing Boko Haram were raped by police and soldiers.

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Lagos - Nigeria's president has ordered an investigation into allegations by a rights group of rapes by soldiers and police of women and girls fleeing the Islamist militant group Boko Haram.

Human Rights Watch said in a statement published on Monday that 43 cases of "sexual abuse, including rape and exploitation", had been documented by its researchers in July. A police spokesman flatly rejected the report.

The women and girls were housed at seven camps in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, for people displaced by Boko Haram's seven-year-old insurgency, the rights group said.

The Islamist campaign has driven more than two million people from their homes and killed some 15 000 in Nigeria's northeast.

The rights group said it was also told of abuse carried out by camp leaders employed by authorities and members of local militias set up to help the military fight the insurgents.

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari was "worried and shocked" by the allegations, his spokesman Garba Shehu said in a statement on Monday.

"President Buhari has instructed the inspector general of police and the state governors of the affected states to immediately commence investigations into the issue."

Four people told HRW they had been drugged and raped. Thirty-seven said they had been coerced into sex through false promises of marriage and material and financial assistance.

A 17-year-old girl said she was raped by a policeman.

"One day he demanded to have sex with me. I refused but he forced me," she said. She said he threatened to shoot and kill her when she discovered she was pregnant.

A 16-year-old who fled an attack on Baga, near Lake Chad, said she was drugged and raped in May 2015 by a local militia member in charge of distributing aid in a camp.

"There are no reported cases of infractions of law by policemen on or off duty," Don Awunah, a spokesman for Nigeria's national police force, said on Monday in response to the allegations.

An army spokesman declined to comment on allegations related to soldiers and referred the matter to the defence ministry. A spokesman for the department could not be reached by phone and did not respond to a text message.

Boko Haram, which controlled a swathe of land in the northeast around the size of Belgium early last year, has largely been pushed back to its base in the northeast's vast Sambisa forest in recent months.

Reuters

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Zimbabwe's evicted farmers pin hopes on compensation

Posted: 31 Oct 2016 08:00 AM PDT

Countless elderly white landowners are struggling to make ends meet as they wait for compensation that many fear may never come.

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Mutare, Zimbabwe - Brian van Buuren, a white former farmer in Burma Valley, eastern Zimbabwe, couldn't hide his anger as he recalled how he lost almost everything during the country's controversial land reforms.

After investing most of his money in his tobacco farm, Van Buuren was left almost destitute when his land was seized by the government in 2010.

“I lost virtually everything,” van Buuren, 80, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Today, he is one of countless evicted elderly white landowners struggling to make ends meet as they wait for compensation that many fear may never come - since the black farmers expected to stump up the cash say they don't have it.

In 2001, President Robert Mugabe introduced laws to more equitably distribute land between black subsistence farmers and white Zimbabweans of European ancestry.

The reforms were aimed at addressing colonial imbalances in which a small number of white farmers owned most of the best agricultural land in Zimbabwe.

Earlier this year, the government pledged to compensate all farmers who lost their farms during the land reform programme, in which about 5 000 white farmers were evicted from their land in often violent struggles, and at least 12 people died.

The violence and allegations of rigged elections and rights abuses - all denied by Mugabe - led to Western sanctions.

The sanctions compounded an economic crisis that had worsened since the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and African Development Bank suspended aid in 1999, after Zimbabwe defaulted on debts.

The country's new constitution, adopted in 2013, included a provision to compensate the white farmers who were evicted, particularly for the improvements they had made on their farms.

In September, Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the government had paid $42.7 million to farmers in compensation.

“The government has taken a big step towards compensation of previous farmers,” he said. “The government is expediting the mapping and valuation of improvements on farms acquired under the land reform programme so it can compensate the farmers.”

‘Cruel irony’

Chinamasa said land rentals and levies paid by the beneficiaries of the land reforms would be used to compensate the white farmers. Part of the $42.7 million compensation had come from these funds, he said.

But today, many of the black farmers expected to fund the compensation through levies and taxes say they simply don't have the money, thereby delaying the whole process.

Very few had farming skills when the government resettled them, say experts, and can now barely make ends meet, let alone pay extra levies.

The new farmers' agricultural output is now a fraction of the level seen before 2000 when Mugabe introduced the land reform.

They are also being hammered by Zimbabwe's worst drought in a quarter of a century while also toiling under a stagnating economy that has seen banks reluctant to lend and cheaper food imports from the likes of South Africa undermining local businesses.

According to the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, a group of mostly black farmers, compensation for the white farmers must relate to land development and assets, not the land itself.

The executive director, Paul Zakariya, said compensation for the land would be “unconstitutional as it belongs to the state”.

“The new (black) farmers must be levied and this levy should used to pay the white farmers. We don't want everyone in the country to be taxed and the money used to pay the white farmers but we want those who benefited from the land reform to be levied”.

That the redistributed lands and farms are lying unused or abandoned is a particularly cruel irony for former farmers like van Buuren who put everything into their land, they say.

Having bought the farm in Manicaland province back in 1964, van Buuren turned it into a successful tobacco farming entity and later diversified into banana farming with a local company.

Over the years, he invested in irrigation equipment, tobacco barns, fruit trees, tractors and two dams, as well as other infrastructure and machinery - all of which were seized.

“They took all my equipment and I only recovered two vehicles and a bit of furniture,” he said.

Although he now owns and lives in a modest house in Mutare city, he fears for the future as his savings have run out.

“I had very few savings as I had invested all the money in the farm. We are now struggling to survive. I am worried. We just sit here. We can't afford to go anywhere,” he said.

According to Van Buuren, all 12 white farmers in the Burma Valley area lost their land in the reform programme.

“Many farmers are now destitute,” he said.

Glimmer of hope

His sentiments were echoed by another farmer, Pieter de Klerk, who had to give up Kondozi Farm, a thriving horticultural export entity in Odzi, also in Manicaland province.

One of De Klerk's sons, who also lost his land in Zimbabwe, has re-established himself as a cassava farmer in Tanzania.

“My children are now sustaining me,” De Klerk said. “It took me 50 years to build that place but all is gone.”

Another farmer, Schalk du Pless, said: “We are now supported by our children. Had it not been for that, we could have been dead.”

Du Pless and De Klerk, both in their eighties, live at a home for the elderly in Mutare. They are among many white former farmers of their generation who are struggling, said Mutare's former mayor Brian James, whose own farm was seized.

“Some are destitute, particularly the elderly. Some (farmers) are desperately looking for jobs. Others have left the country,” James said.

However, with Zimbabwe's unemployment standing at more than 80 percent, the chances of former farmers who are still able to work finding employment are slim.

While some fear the cash-strapped government won't be able to compensate all of them, others want to see a glimmer of hope.

Van Buuren said his farm, which he says had a value of almost $1 million, could still provide him with enough money for his retirement if the government pays compensation.

“Even given an opportunity to go back on my farm, at my age I couldn't do it... but I can have some compensation,” he said.

But with no sign that compensation will be paid soon, Van Buuren fears he might die before receiving any payment.

“I am 80 years old now,” he said. Soon I will be gone, but will I get the compensation (in time)?”

THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION

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Nigerian soldiers, police 'rape Boko Haram victims'

Posted: 31 Oct 2016 04:37 AM PDT

Nigerian soldiers and policemen have sexually abused women and girls fleeing Boko Haram, Human Rights Watch says.

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Lagos - Nigerian soldiers and policemen have raped and sexually abused women and girls fleeing the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, Human Rights Watch said on Monday.

Forty-three cases of "sexual abuse, including rape and exploitation", were documented in July, HRW said.

The women and girls were housed at seven camps in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, where Boko Haram's seven-year insurgency began. That insurgency has displaced more than two million people and killed some 15,000 in Nigeria's northeast.

An army spokesman declined to comment and referred the matter to the defence ministry. A spokesman for the department could not be reached by phone and did not respond to a text message. A spokesman for the Nigerian police could not be reached on his mobile phone.

The rights group said it was also told of abuse carried out by camp leaders and members of security groups set up to help the military fight the insurgents.

Four people told HRW they were drugged and raped. Thirty-seven said they had been coerced into sex through false marriage promises and material and financial assistance.

A 17-year-old girl said she was raped by a policeman who approached her in a camp.

"One day he demanded to have sex with me. I refused but he forced me," she said, adding that it happened once. She said he threatened to shoot and kill her when she discovered that she was pregnant.

Another girl - a 16-year-old who fled an attack on Baga, near Lake Chad, last year - said she was drugged and raped in May 2015 by a community security group member in charge of distributing aid in the camp.

Boko Haram, which controlled a swathe of land in the northeast around the size of Belgium early last year, has largely been pushed back to its base in the northeast's vast Sambisa forest in the last few months.

Aid workers and soldiers have gained access to the group's former northeastern strongholds, revealing famine-like conditions which UNICEF says could kill 75,000 children over the next year if they do not receive aid.

Nigerian lawmakers in early October said they would investigate the use of government funds intended to assist displaced people, amid claims that money had been diverted .

Reuters

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Slavery a crime against humanity - French PM

Posted: 31 Oct 2016 02:58 AM PDT

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has dismissed claims for financial compensation for slavery in Africa.

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Accra, Ghana - French Prime Minister Manuel Valls issued an appeal on Sunday to overcome the legacy of slavery, dismissing claims for financial compensation while acknowledging the "horror" of the slave trade.

Valls was visiting Franklin House, a former slave hub in the Ghanaian capital Accra, on Sunday on the second leg of a three-country tour of West Africa.

"We cannot repair slavery but we can prepare the future" he said in an article published by the French daily Le Monde and the English magazine The Africa Report.

Valls rejected the idea of compensation, instead advocating for strengthened trade relations between Africa and Europe.

"It is not so much about living for the idea of reparation... as about looking to tomorrow, about strengthening the ties between our two continents on either side of the Mediterranean," he said.

"The slave trade was a disaster on a large scale. That reality must be remembered, taught and hammered home," he said, "the many atrocities, rapes and murders. It was a crime against humanity."

But Valls argued against calls for reparations, rejecting the idea that Africa's history is solely defined by slavery.

"Memory should not divide. It should, on the contrary, close fractures and bring people together, if only we do not give in to the awfulness of competing memories, hierarchies and comparing the suffering of some with the misfortune of others.

"I also know that the history of Africa is so much more than the history of slavery, to which it is too often reduced," he said, adding: "I know that Africa has the strength to free itself from that past."

French President Francois Hollande on a May 2015 trip to the Caribbean spoke of the debt France owed to Haiti, but his office later said he was referring to a "moral debt" rather than financial compensation.

France abolished slavery in all its colonies in 1848 but only recognised slavery as a crime against humanity since 2001.

Valls, who arrived in Ghana on Saturday from Togo, heads later Sunday to the Ivory Coast.

AFP

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Thousands protest fishmonger's rubbish truck death

Posted: 31 Oct 2016 01:46 AM PDT

Thousands of Moroccans attended the funeral of a fishmonger whose grisly death in a rubbish truck crusher has caused outrage,

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Al Hoceima, Morocco - Thousands of Moroccans on Sunday attended the funeral of a fishmonger whose gruesome death in a rubbish truck crusher has caused outrage across the North African country, with authorities vowing to punish those responsible.

WARNING: Twitter embed in this article contains graphic image.

Mouhcine Fikri, 31, was crushed to death on Friday in the truck in the northern city of Al-Hoceima as he reportedly tried to protest against a municipal worker seizing and destroying his wares.

An image of his inert body - head and arm sticking out from under the lorry's crushing mechanism - went viral on social media, sparking calls for protests nationwide including in the capital Rabat.

Footage online showed thousands of people following the yellow ambulance that carried Fikri's body through Al-Hoceima in the ethnically Berber Rif region on Sunday.

Interior Minister Mohamed Hassad condemned the incident and vowed that an investigation would be held to "determine the exact circumstances of the tragedy and punish those responsible".

"No one had the right to treat him like this.... We cannot accept officials acting in haste, anger or in conditions that do not respect people's rights," he told AFP.

The funeral procession was led by a dozen drivers in their cars - including taxis - and marchers waving Berber flags.

The ambulance headed to the area of Imzouren some 20 kilometres (12 miles) southeast of the city, where Fikri was buried in the late afternoon.

The circumstances of his death remained unclear.

But a human rights activist told AFP that the authorities forced the fishmonger to destroy several boxes of swordfish. Catching swordfish using driftnets is illegal.

"The goods were worth a lot of money," said Fassal Aoussar from the local branch of the Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH).

"The salesman threw himself in after his fish and was crushed by the machine," he said.

"The whole of the Rif is in shock and boiling over."

Long neglected under the father of the current king, the Rif was at the heart of Morocco's protest movement for change in 2011, dubbed the February 20 movement.

Protests continued in Al-Hoceima late Sunday, an AFP reporter said, with protesters shouting: "Criminals, assassins, terrorists!"

"The people of the Rif won't be humiliated!"

The crowd eventually dispersed around 2130 GMT without incident.

Thousands of demonstrators - including activists for Berber rights - also gathered in Rabat, chanting "We are all Mouhcine!".

Smaller protests were held in several other Rif towns and, unusually, in Casablanca and Marrakesh.

In a statement on Sunday, the AMDH condemned the state for "having trampled on the dignity of citizens since the ferocious repression of the February 20 movement and keeping the region in a state of tension".

It warned of a "possible repeat" of the 2011 protests in the Rif, just a week before Morocco starts hosting international climate talks.

King Mohammed VI has ordered a "thorough and exhaustive investigation" into Fikri's death and the "prosecution of whoever is found responsible", an interior ministry statement said.

The king - who was in Zanzibar on a tour of East Africa - sent the interior minister to "present his condolences" to Fikri's family, it said.

It was the self-immolation of a street vendor in Tunisia in late 2010 in protest at police harassment that sparked Tunisia's revolution and the Arab Spring uprisings across the rest of the region the next year.

Morocco is due to host the COP22 climate talks in Marrakesh from November 7 to 18.

AFP

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'I lost virtually everything'

Posted: 31 Oct 2016 12:37 AM PDT

Evicted elderly white Zimbabweans struggle to make ends meet as they wait for compensation.

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Mutare, Zimbabwe - Brian van Buuren, a white former farmer in Burma Valley, eastern Zimbabwe, couldn't hide his anger as he recalled how he lost almost everything during the country's controversial land reforms.

After investing most of his money in his tobacco farm, van Buuren was left almost destitute when his land was seized by the government in 2010.

"I lost virtually everything," Van Buuren, 80, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Today, he is one of many evicted elderly white landowners struggling to make ends meet as they wait for compensation that many fear may never come - since the black farmers expected to stump up the cash say they don't have it.

In 2001, President Robert Mugabe introduced laws to more equitably distribute land between black subsistence farmers and white Zimbabweans.

The reforms were aimed at addressing colonial imbalances in which a small number of white farmers owned most of the best agricultural land in Zimbabwe.

Earlier this year, the government pledged to compensate all farmers who lost their farms during the land reform programme, in which about 5 000 white farmers were evicted from their land in often violent struggles, and at least 12 people died.

The violence and allegations of rigged elections and rights abuses - all denied by Mugabe - led to Western sanctions.

The sanctions compounded an economic crisis that had worsened since the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and African Development Bank suspended aid in 1999, after Zimbabwe defaulted on debts.

The country's new constitution, adopted in 2013, included a provision to compensate the white farmers who were evicted, particularly for the improvements they had made on their farms.

In September, Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa said the government had paid $42.7 million to farmers in compensation.

"The government has taken a big step towards compensation of previous farmers," he said. "The government is expediting the mapping and valuation of improvements on farms acquired under the land reform programme so it can compensate the farmers."

Chinamasa said land rentals and levies paid by the beneficiaries of the land reforms would be used to compensate the white farmers. Part of the $42.7 million compensation had come from these funds, he said.

But today, many of the black farmers expected to fund the compensation through levies and taxes say they simply don't have the money, thereby delaying the whole process.

Very few had farming skills when the government resettled them, say experts, and can now barely make ends meet, let alone pay extra levies.

The new farmers' agricultural output is now a fraction of the level seen before 2000 when Mugabe introduced the land reform.

They are also being hammered by Zimbabwe's worst drought in a quarter of a century while also toiling under a stagnating economy that has seen banks reluctant to lend and cheaper food imports from the likes of South Africa undermining local businesses.

According to the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, a group of mostly black farmers, compensation for the white farmers must relate to land development and assets, not the land itself.

The executive director, Paul Zakariya, said compensation for the land would be "unconstitutional as it belongs to the state".

"The new (black) farmers must be levied and this levy should used to pay the white farmers. We don't want everyone in the country to be taxed and the money used to pay the white farmers but we want those who benefited from the land reform to be levied".

That the redistributed lands and farms are lying unused or abandoned is a particularly cruel irony for former farmers like Van Buuren who put everything into their land, they say.

Having bought the farm in Manicaland province back in 1964, Van Buuren turned it into a successful tobacco farming entity and later diversified into banana farming with a local company.

Over the years, he invested in irrigation equipment, tobacco barns, fruit trees, tractors and two dams, as well as other infrastructure and machinery - all of which were seized.

"They took all my equipment and I only recovered two vehicles and a bit of furniture," he said.

Although he now owns and lives in a modest house in Mutare, he fears for the future as his savings have run out.

"I had very few savings as I had invested all the money in the farm. We are now struggling to survive. I am worried. We just sit here. We can't afford to go anywhere," he said.

According to Van Buuren, all 12 white farmers in the Burma Valley area lost their land in the reform programme.

"Many farmers are now destitute," he said.

His sentiments were echoed by another farmer, Pieter de Klerk, who had to give up Kondozi Farm, a thriving horticultural export entity in Odzi, also in Manicaland province.

One of De Klerk's sons, who also lost his land in Zimbabwe, has re-established himself as a cassava farmer in Tanzania.

"My children are now sustaining me," De Klerk said. "It took me 50 years to build that place but all is gone."

Another farmer, Schalk du Pless, said: "We are now supported by our children. Had it not been for that, we could have been dead."

Du Pless and De Klerk, both in their eighties, live at a home for the elderly in Mutare. They are among many white former farmers of their generation who are struggling, said Mutare's former mayor Brian James, whose own farm was seized.

"Some are destitute, particularly the elderly. Some (farmers) are desperately looking for jobs. Others have left the country," James said.

However, with Zimbabwe's unemployment standing at more than 80 percent, the chances of former farmers who are still able to work finding employment are slim.

While some fear the cash-strapped government won't be able to compensate all of them, others want to see a glimmer of hope.

Van Buuren said his farm, which he says had a value of almost $1 million, could still provide him with enough money for his retirement if the government pays compensation.

"Even given an opportunity to go back on my farm, at my age I couldn't do it ... but I can have some compensation," he said.

But with no sign that compensation will be paid soon, Van Buuren fears he might die before receiving any payment.

"I am 80 years old now," he said. Soon I will be gone, but will I get the compensation (in time)?"

Thomson Reuters Foundation

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