News Africa Extended

News Africa Extended

Kenyan leader 'frustrated by corruption'

Posted: 18 Oct 2016 11:41 PM PDT

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has directed agencies tasked with fighting corruption to speed up their efforts.

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Nairobi - Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Tuesday directed agencies tasked with fighting corruption to speed up their efforts.

Kenyatta defended his government, which he said has done more than all previous administrations since independence in fighting graft by sending senior government officials to court.

"Corruption should not be used for politics. Kenya must continue. As president, if there is one issue that has frustrated me, it is this issue," Kenyatta told a State House summit in Nairobi.

He challenged the different departments to play their role effectively instead of passing blame to each other.

Kenyatta said he has played his role in fighting corruption and cautioned politicians against using the issue for political gain.

He said he has even sacked six members of his cabinet on the basis of corruption claims made by the anti-graft agency.

The president also said that he would like to see the Kenyan courts putting in more efforts to deal with corruption cases.

Xinhua

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My wife belongs in the kitchen, says Nigerian president

Posted: 18 Oct 2016 11:17 AM PDT

This was Muhammadu Buhari’s response after his wife Aisha publicly criticised his record in office.

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Lagos - A row between the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife has brought cracks in the ruling party right into the open, as frustration grows over government inertia in trying to drag the country out of its first recession in 25 years.

Aisha Buhari publicly criticised her husband's record in office, saying she might not support him if he seeks re-election in 2019 unless he shakes up his administration, which she said had been hijacked by a “few people”.

The president tried to laugh off the rebuke from his wife of 27 years, saying “she belongs in the kitchen” - but without addressing the substance of her remarks, made last week in an interview with the BBC.

The 73-year-old won last year's election promising a new era in the West African nation, where graft has enriched an elite while most of the 180 million Nigerians live in poverty despite the OPEC member's oil wealth.

Buhari came to power backed by his All Progressives Congress (APC) party, a broad coalition of politicians who united to remove his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, without having a joint plan on how to run the country.

Now, 17 months into office, there are few signs of Buhari's promised reforms to diversify the economy away from exporting crude, prices of which have halved since 2014.

Already the naira is down 35 percent this year, making it one of the worst performing currencies in the world, and the National Bureau of Statistics forecasts the economy will shrink by 1.3 percent in 2016.

But criticism of the government goes beyond an apparent lack of urgency in tackling the economic crisis. A belief is growing that power is concentrated among Buhari's chief of staff and an inner circle at the presidential villa, making it difficult for ministers to get the attention of the president.

The First Lady is not alone in her views. Senate President Bukola Saraki, the third most senior politician in Nigeria, took to Twitter to express his concerns. “It has become clear that there is govt within govt of @MBuhari who've seized apparatus of Executive powers to pursue their nefarious agenda,” he tweeted in June.

Buhari's spokesmen declined to comment while the president himself has defended his economic record in general terms. “I believe that this recession will not last,” he said this month. “We have identified the country's salient problems and we are working hard at lasting solutions.”

Annual inflation accelerated in September to 17.9 percent, a more than 11-year high, and last week about 100 young people demonstrated near the central bank over the naira's fall.

But, generally, the discontent has yet to turn into mass protest. “Let me commend Nigerians for your patience, steadfastness and perseverance. You know that I am trying to do the right things for our country,” said Buhari.

 

“Small clique”

Nevertheless, Buhari has not answered questions about how Nigeria is governed under his presidency.

“People feel that the country is being run by a small clique of people who have taken over and are acting in the name of the president,” said Clement Nwankwo, director of the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre, a think-tank in Abuja.

Buhari has put Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, a commercial lawyer, in charge of economic politics. But Osinbajo, who favours a more flexible currency policy to attract badly-needed foreign investment, has struggled to get his ideas heard.

“There is great worry that the input of the vice president does not seem to be taken into account in implementing policies, especially on the economic front,” Nwankwo said.

Buhari has said that as an ex-general he is no expert in economics, and yet he long rejected a devaluation of the naira - just as he did as military ruler in the 1980s when Nigeria was also in recession.

When the central bank finally dropped the naira's peg to the dollar in June, the currency slumped 30 percent and many equity and bond investors had in any case long since gone.

Even now, Nigeria is operating a “managed float” which is keeping the official naira rate at around 305 to the dollar, far stronger than Monday's black market rate of 455.

As ever in Nigerian politics, the division of powers between the mainly Muslim north, where Buhari is from, and the Christian south is playing a role.

Diplomats say members of northern circles known to Buhari for decades have resisted some ministers such as Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun, a southerner in her 40s who was not his first choice.

A source close to the presidency described the accusations of inertia as grumbling by some in the APC who had hoped for jobs or contracts under a system of patronage which Buhari stopped under his anti-graft drive.

 

Difficult choices

Buhari needed to pick a cabinet from the APC but this was complicated because he was constitutionally bound to pick a minister from each of Nigeria's 36 states.

To insert his influence he then brought in people he has known for decades. Members of his “kitchen cabinet” include his chief of staff Abba Kyari, whom Buhari has also put on the board of state oil firm NNPC, his uncle Mamman Daura and Babachir Lawal, the secretary to the government of the federation.

“Buhari is deeply suspicious of politicians because of Nigeria's history of graft,” said one Western diplomat. “There are few people he trusts or regularly talks to to seek their advice.”

The preeminence of the inner circle has, say political insiders, created a rift between the president and Bola Tinubu, a former Lagos state governor who rallied southern Christian elites to help win power.

Tinubu has issued statements attacking APC chairman John Oyegun and oil minister Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, deepening divisions in the party.

 

Little activity

Buhari has won plaudits from ordinary Nigerians by saying he will target a hyper-rich elite accused of massive corruption.

He has also managed to retake most territory lost to the Islamist militants of Boko Haram and negotiated the release of 21 of more than 200 girls kidnapped in 2014, although suicide bombings remain part of life in northeastern Nigeria.

But much of his first year in office was beset by slow progress. A five-month wait for his cabinet to be formed was followed by wrangling with parliament over the 2016 budget, which was only signed off by Buhari in May.

Efforts to make Nigeria more business-friendly have stalled. Trade Minister Okechukwu Enelamah wants to ease visa rules, acknowledging complaints from foreign executives about obstructive embassy officials, but has given no timeframe.

Nigeria could have earned as much as $8 billion in travel receipts this year, instead of the $500 million booked in 2014, had it adopted visitor-friendly visa rules like Ghana, Renaissance Capital said in a report.

Some investors have expressed frustration over hard currency curbs. “You can't even discuss a rational foreign exchange policy,” David Lapido, director at Amaya Capital invested in Nigeria's power industry, told a panel debate.

Leading economists recently met Buhari, stressing it was high time for action as there were just 18 months left before the next election would paralyse politics.

“We were very frank,” said Bismarck Rewane, CEO of Financial Derivatives consultancy who attended the meeting. “The president is paying serious attention to the economy. I am now more optimistic.”

Reuters

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'100 Chibok girls unwilling to leave Boko Haram'

Posted: 18 Oct 2016 03:50 AM PDT

A Nigerian community leader says the government is negotiating the release of 83 Chibok girls - but there are others who don't want rescue.

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Abuja - A Nigerian community leader says the government is negotiating the release of another 83 of the Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction two-and-a-half years ago but more than 100 others appear unwilling to return home.

Pogu Bitrus, chairman of the Chibok Development Association, told The Associated Press that the unwilling girls may have been radicalised by Boko Haram or are ashamed to return because they have married extremists and have babies.

Bitrus said the 21 Chibok girls freed last week in the first negotiated release between Nigeria's government and Boko Haram should be educated abroad, because they will probably face stigma in Nigeria.

The girls and their parents were reunited on Sunday and are expected to meet with Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday or Wednesday, Bitrus said.

Buhari flew to Germany on an official visit the day of the girls' release.

Some 276 schoolgirls were kidnapped from a school in northeastern Chibok in April 2014. Dozens escaped early on and a few died in captivity.

All those who escaped on their own have left Chibok because, even though they were held only a few hours, they were labelled "Boko Haram wives" and taunted, he said. At least 20 of the girls are being educated in the United States.

"We would prefer that they are taken away from the community and this country because the stigmatisation is going to affect them for the rest of their lives," Bitrus said. "Even someone believed to have been abused by Boko Haram would be seen in a bad light."

One Chibok girl, Amina Ali Nkeki, escaped in May. Chibok Parents' Association chairman Yakubu Nkeki said the young woman has been reunited with her freed classmates, all of whom are being treated by doctors, psychologists and trauma counsellors at a hospital in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, run by the Department of State Security, Nigeria's secret service.

Human rights advocates and the Bring Back Our Girls Movement have been asking if the girl is a detainee of the government and have been demanding she be allowed to return home, as she has requested.

The newly freed girls have told their parents they were separated into two groups early on in their captivity, when Boko Haram commanders gave them the choice of joining the extremists and embracing Islam, or becoming their slaves, Bitrus said.

The girls freed and those whose release is being negotiated, numbering 104, are believed to be in the group that rejected Islam and Boko Haram, he explained. The freed girls said they never saw the other girls again.

Bitrus said the freed girls were used as domestic workers and porters but were not sexually abused. He said that was why only one girl in the freed group is carrying a baby, and her parents have confirmed that she was pregnant when she was kidnapped. .

Previous negotiators in talks that failed also had corroborated that more than 100 of the girls did not want to return to their parents, Bitrus said.

Chibok is a small and conservative Christian enclave in mainly Muslim northern Nigeria, where many parents are involved in translating the Bible into local languages and belong to the Nigerian branch of the Elgin, Illinois-based Church of the Brethren.

Nigeria's government has denied reports that the girls were swapped for four Boko Haram commanders, or that a large ransom was paid.

* This story has been updated - IOL

AP

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Namibia students fight demand to pay their fees

Posted: 18 Oct 2016 03:43 AM PDT

Student protests have forced the management at the main University of Namibia campus to postpone examinations.

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Windhoek - Student protests have forced the management at the main University of Namibia campus in Windhoek to postpone examinations that were scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Vice Chancellor Lazarus Hangura, who received a petition from the students on Monday, said the university council would decide the way forward on Thursday.

Hangura could not say when the postponed examinations will be written.

The protests were sparked on Monday by the order by the university for students to pay their fees before they could sit for the examinations.

The move to bar indebted students was arrived at after the university realised that it is owed more than N$145 million (US$10.3 million).

This is the first time the university has had to demand full payment before the students sat for the examinations.

In the past, indebted students were allowed to write but would only collect their results when they paid in full.

In January 2016, students at the University of Namibia demonstrated against paying registration fees and were allowed to enroll. There are 19, 000 students at the university.

Xinhua

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