News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

11 000 people in detention in Ethiopia

Posted: 13 Nov 2016 10:20 PM PST

Ethiopia's state of emergency inquiry board says that over 11 000 people have been detained in different parts of the country.

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Addis Ababa - Ethiopia's state of emergency inquiry board says that over 11,000 individuals suspected of inciting political unrest in different parts of the country have been detained.

Board chairman Tadesse Hordofa said the arrests were made since the start of the six-month-long state of emergency on October 9 and those arrested were being held in six detention centres and military camps around the country.

"Some 11,607 individuals have so far been detained in six prisons, of which 347 are female, in connection with the state of emergency declared in the country," he said in a statement broadcast by the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC).

All those arrested were above 18 years old, with the majority being youth, farmers, and traders.

"No foreign citizen has been arrested so far," he said.

A few weeks ago, government reported the release of about 2 000 people after they had been "counselled". It is unclear whether this figure is part of the current statistics.

The board was due to release a list containing the names of detainees to all regional states starting from Saturday. All regions were required to post the list in public places so that families of detainees could easily identify their whereabouts.

A recent cabinet reshuffle by Prime Minister Hailemariam Daselegn saw key positions handed to Oromos, whose region has been the centre of protests. Oromia surrounds Addis Ababa on all sides.

Demonstrations spilled into the Amhara region in the north. In a bid to curb the unrest, the government, which has been in power for 25 years, declared a six-month state of emergency "because the situation posed a threat against the people of the country".

Amnesty International has reported human rights violations, including arbitrary mass arrests, and restricted media access and internet censorship in Ethiopia. Bloggers and activists have also been also arrested but the board chairman did not mention this in his statement.

Hordofa also read a long list of alleged offences committed by the arrested people, ranging from major crimes such as "attacking security forces using firearms" or "killing civilians and members of security forces" to the much more mundane "denying provision of public services" and "disrupting movement of vehicles".

Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC) chairman Merera Gudina reported at a European Parliament hearing that at least 1 500 people were killed in the past year of protests by security forces while 60,000 were detained without due process of law.

"These are mass arrests targeting innocent people just because they have opposed the government and expressed their views. This needs to stop. It is spinning out of control," he said.

African News Agency

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Mugabe’s successor? Military has no say

Posted: 13 Nov 2016 06:15 PM PST

Zimbabwe’s military has no say on who should take over from Robert Mugabe, according to the country's army commander.

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Harare - Zimbabwe's military has no say on who should take over from President Robert Mugabe, the country's army commander said, as tension mounts within the ruling party over who will succeed Africa's oldest leader.

Mugabe, 92, has held power since the country gained independence from Britain in 1980. But he is increasingly looking frail, stoking a scramble in Zanu-PF to succeed him.

Local media say some top military generals and a group within Zanu-PF are backing Vice-President Emmerson Mnangagwa to succeed Mugabe. Another faction is widely believed to be manoeuvring to impose Mugabe's wife, Grace, as a possible successor.

Lieutenant-General Valerio Sibanda, the Zimbabwe National Army Commander, told the state-owned Sunday Mail newspaper that the military should not get involved.

“In Zanu-PF the military has no role to play in terms of succession politics, and that is the long and short of it,” he said, in his first comments on the succession issue.

Last year in December, Mugabe warned against the country's military generals and other security services supporting different candidates, saying it could ruin Zanu-PF.

Opposition parties accuse military commanders, who fought in the 1970s independence war, of working hard to ensure Zanu-PF remains in power.

On the eve of presidential elections in 2002 and 2008, military generals said they would not salute a leader who had not fought in the battle for independence. This was seen as an attack on main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who did not participate in the liberation struggle.

REUTERS

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Faint hopes over abducted Sudan refugees

Posted: 13 Nov 2016 06:29 AM PST

Humanitarian organisations are working round the clock to ascertain the whereabouts of 32 children and women kidnapped in South Sudan.

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Khartoum - Humanitarian organisations are working round the clock to ascertain the whereabouts of 32 children and women kidnapped by armed groups in South Sudan.

It is feared they might have been killed following the recent abduction and subsequent killing of other refugees near the refugee hosting area of Lasu Payam.

The fatal shooting and machete attack by armed groups killed two and wounded five refugees from the Kordofan region.

Meanwhile, four women and 28 children are still in captivity in an unknown location following their abduction from a refugee centre in late October.

The captors entered the settlement and asked refugees to present their food ration cards for food distribution mobilisation, allegedly on behalf of the United Nations.

A UN spokesperson said they were attempting to obtain details about the whereabouts of the abducted group and their captors. Prior to the raids, Lasu hosted over 10 000 refugees. The camp is now empty.

ANA-CAJ News

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Lean times for Zim as cash crisis bites

Posted: 13 Nov 2016 01:48 AM PST

Nothing is going right for Zimbabwe right now. There is virtually no cash in the banks and millions of people are more hungry this year than at any time in the last 20 years.

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Harare - Nothing is going right for Zimbabwe right now. After so much turmoil for more than 15 years, there seems no end to the never-ending drama in Harare.

There is virtually no cash in the banks and millions of people are more hungry this year than at any time in the last 20 years.

“Zimbabwe faces one of the most severe lean seasons in the last few decades,” according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET), which monitors food production and food prices in many countries.

The body says Zimbabwe is suffering from the impact of last season’s El Niño-induced drought - which was a second consecutive dry year - as well as “macro-economic challenges”.

The financial “challenges” it refers to is the lack of cash in the banks, as Zimbabwe has run out of its most popular currency, US dollars, and this week, in particular, banks reduced even further the amount it could release to customers. Many people sleep in the streets outside banks, hoping to be first in the queue, so they can withdraw their salaries or pensions, but the banks have severely slashed the amount they can release.

To ease the current shortage of cash, Zimbabwe says it will release small-denomination, specially prin-ted “bond notes” later this month. These can only be used in Zimbabwe. No one is sure where the notes will be printed.

At Old Mutual’s Central African Building Society (CABS), tellers at its most prestigious branch, north of the city centre, said this week they could only release $50, mostly in “filthy” notes, to its VIP customers. The teller at one branch on Wednesday said he was only able to serve 10 customers that day, and expected to run out of notes by mid-morning.

One customer said: “We suspect the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) is scooping up as many dollars as possible so that the shortage is even worse than usual, as this will make the new bond notes much more acceptable.”

Many are worried that the bond notes will become the only currency, and prove to be as worthless as the Zimbabwean dollar was when it was abandoned eight years ago.

RBZ governor John Mangudya has been on a nationwide tour, and has allowed more journalists into his city centre office than any of his predecessors, and funded a huge publicity campaign to explain the bond notes.

He says the cash is a financial instrument, and doesn’t signal the return of the Zimbabwe dollar. He adds that the new notes are backed by $200 million from the Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), of which Zimbabwe is a shareholder.

Well-placed banking sources said Afreximbank has recently released $150m into the international accounts of some of Zimbabwe’s main banks so they can pay for key imports such as medicines, food and fuel.

Mangudya says he will resign if the new cash goes the same way as the Zim dollar, which the central bank printed in ever-higher denominations until it had no value and had to be abandoned in late 2008 when civil servants went unpaid, supermarkets were empty, children had no teachers, and state hospitals could not function. Anyone with a pension fund lost it and savings accounts were wiped out.

The battered economy, which began to rebuild after the inclusive government came to power in 2009, adopted the US dollar and rand, but deteriorated sharply after Zanu-PF returned to power with a massive, if disputed electoral majority, in 2013.

Many Zimbabweans pulled their dollars from the banks and Mangudya says he understands why many people are suspicious of the bond notes: “Many lost everything and were traumatised at that time,” he told Independent Media.

Mangudya says he knows that some people and companies took massive amounts of dollars to South Africa as they scored well when the rand was collapsing in the past couple of years.

Zimbabwe imports far more than it exports and its economy is, literally, on its knees, according to a wide range of economists and bankers.

Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa is looking for international loans and, in his quest to secure them, paid off Zimbabwe’s debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) last month.

However, plans to raise new loans have so far failed, and the IMF now says there is little chance of Zimbabwe raising cash to rebuild infrastructure because it has not managed to fulfil the reform agenda it committed to in Lima last year.

The EU, which is a huge humanitarian donor to Zimbabwe, said last week that part of the deal for Zimbabwe to rejoin the international financial world was that land invasions would end so that the agriculture sector could rebuild.

Several key farms used by productive white farmers, in business with small-scale farmers, have recently been invaded.

One, a highly productive and profitable banana and tomato farm in southern Zimbabwe, was destroyed last month by invasions carried out by the Zanu-PF Women’s League, which is led by the country’s first lady, Grace Mugabe.

“The Zanu-PF Women’s League was allocated that farm,” said Zanu-PF Senator Tambudzani Mohadi earlier this week. “I didn’t take it. I have my own 3 000 hectares.”

Her husband, security minister Kembo Mohadi, also took a farm post-2000.

Phillip van Damme, EU ambassador to Zimbabwe, said in a statement released this week that the continuing invasions of productive farms was a violation of the reform agreement that Zimbabwe signed up to with the international financial world in Lima last year.

Van Damme said that all EU countries agreed that the country’s post-2000 land-reform programme could not be reversed, but accepted Zimbabwe’s commitment to “bring to an end the land-reform process”.

Both Mangudya and Chinamasa said in Lima last year that Zimbabwe’s land grab was over, and that the country would rebuild agriculture to boost the economy.

Zimbabwe never had food aid before 2000 as it produced more than it consumed until land invasions began in 2000. Even in previous droughts, such as 1991-92, Zimbabwe was able to fund imports of food.

But the World Food Programme, mostly funded by the US, is delivering emergency food aid to millions in Zimbabwe, and FEWSNET says the situation will be worse in the early months of next year, before the harvest.

It predicted rains into next year would be below average.

Independent Foreign Service

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