Africa

• South African retailers have urged the government to plug tax loopholes that they fear are being used by Chinese e-commerce platform Temu, and Shein, another Chinese online platform,

• Etienne Vlok, a national industrial policy officer for Southern African Clothing and Textile Workers Union, said the government should consider urgent changes to tax rules on small items to ensure fair competition for local businesses.

• Temu, the online shopping juggernaut backed by China’s PDD Holdings Inc. has offered huge discounts in South Africa since its launch in January. The firm has expanded its global footprint to 49 countries and recently took out ads at the Super Bowl to try and sustain growth among US consumers.

In order to attract investment, Nigeria will offer a range of incentives to investors, including tax waivers for importing mining equipment. Enhanced security measures will also be implemented to ensure the safety of mining operations.

However, the granting of mining licenses will be contingent upon companies presenting a detailed plan outlining how they intend to process minerals locally.

This requirement reflects the government’s commitment to creating jobs and benefiting local communities through value addition activities.

[Edit typo.]

While China has built infrastructure throughout the continent, though China’s promising projects are typically faulty or incomplete, revealing its self-serving goals.

Ethiopia is a prominent example of African countries’ challenges. As Ethiopia lacks the funds to build a seaport in its ally Djibouti. China started investing in Ethiopia and agreed to construct a railroad from Addis Ababa to the Port of Djibouti. China gave Ethiopia a $1.3 billion loan with 3% interest and a 6-year repayment period. The modernization project covered 750 km and cost $4 billion. China’s state-owned EXIM bank, one of the primary lenders for BRI projects, covered 70% of the cost with Ethiopia paying the rest in loan installments.

Because China now owns 32.9% of Ethiopia’s external debt, the African country heavily depends on loans from state-owned banks linked to China’s state-controlled market, and is thus affected by China’s economic health.

As repayment amounts are denominated in China's currency yuan, a weaker currency means inflated repayment costs, straining these indebted countries even more.

The overall economic leverage is primarily attributed to a system of high-interest, high-risk loans, as countries fall into a “debt trap” caused by unsustainable debt that continuously accrues.

China has tried to alleviate concerns by highlighting debt-restructuring agreements with African countries. These agreements aim to help struggling countries repay loans, but they’re vague and don’t adequately help countries overcome the debt trap.

Adding to Ethiopia’s woes are corrupt activities by Chinese companies. To get projects in Ethiopia, these firms have bribed corrupt politicians. When they start constructing in Ethiopia, Chinese companies fail to deliver their promises of high-quality infrastructure. In contrast, as Ethiopia’s debt increases, reports have appeared of faltering infrastructure due to lower quality materials than initially promised.

China has built similar projects in other African countries like Kenya and Zambia, with similar attractive promises, like the Nairobi-Mombasa railway and Mongu-Kalabo highway respectively. All these projects require large loans to often opaque conditions.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/10465689

The Irish government will intervene in the case taken by South Africa and argue that restricting food and other essentials in Gaza may constitute genocidal intent, the foreign minister Micheál Martin said on Wednesday.

“We believe there is a case, given how this war has been conducted,” Martin said.

“We will be inviting the court to consider the issue of broadening how you determine whether genocide has taken place or not on the basis of an entire population being collectively punished.”

A clear pattern of behaviour had impeded humanitarian aid, resulting in widespread suffering, he said. “Half the population of Gaza is facing famine and 100% is experiencing food insecurity.”

Investigating Sino-African labour relations at the Karuma hydroelectric dam in Uganda and published recently by Cambridge University Press, researchers Robert Wyrod and Kimberlee Chang urge African countries to introduce stronger worker protections to avoid situations as at Karuma "where [labour] abuse seems systemic".

"Unless African governments take a proactive role in monitoring and enforcing standards in a sector they define as strategic, Chinese state capital operates like any other form of transnational capital," they say.

Their findings suggest that there may be something at work beyond more classic labour conflicts related to pay, benefits and safety. They also stress that the abuse is not simply a language barrier issue.

Dams became some of the most controversial development projects, criticised especially for their environmental damage, displacement of communities, and loss of local livelihoods. Due to such criticisms, by the turn of the millennium the World Bank, along with other Western funders, had reconsidered how dams figured into their development portfolio, essentially retreating from this sector.

This shift in the role of hydroelectric dams in Western development funding coincided with the rise of a new player in global dam construction, particularly China. As part of China's ‘going global’ strategy aimed at finding new international markets for China's state-owned and private companies, China began promoting overseas dam construction, along with other large-scale infrastructure projects.

The researchers focuse on the Karuma Hydropower Project, a 600-megawatt power station on the Nile River in northern Uganda. When completed, the Karuma dam will be the largest in Uganda and one of the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. While Uganda is a relatively small country, it has forged a strong partnership with China in recent years. This has resulted in an outsized range of China funded and/or constructed projects in Uganda.

> In the past decade, more than 63,000 deaths of migrants have been recorded by MMP. Notably, more than one in three of those identified come from countries in conflict, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Syrian Arab Republic, and Ethiopia. With that said, more than two-thirds of those whose deaths are documented in the MMP dataset in the last decade have little to no information on their identities, meaning that each one of these tens of thousands of individuals are unidentified.

Tanzania is experiencing a fearful atmosphere caused by strict measures enforced against individuals who oppose the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). The suppression tactics reached an alarming level when Tanzanian police summoned and questioned nine Project-Affected People (PAPs) from EACOP-affected villages for several hours on March 11th.

French multinational oil company Total and the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) are the project’s main proponents and stand to profit the most from the pipeline’s construction. Both Total and CNOOC hold the licenses to extract oil in Uganda.

EACOP leaders, TotalEnergies, and CNOOC are urged to take immediate action to denounce these violations while valuing community rights and environmental preservation above all else, says StopEACOP an umbrella organization of over 260 human rights and environmental protection groups trying to stop the project.

"EACOP threatens to displace thousands of families and farmers from their land and has already disrupted the livelihoods of many, rip through some of the world’s most important elephant, lion and chimpanzee nature reserves, and will fuel climate change by enabling the extraction of oil which will generate over 34 million tons of CO2 emissions every single year," the groups add.

The head of the African Development Bank is calling for an end to loans given in exchange for the continent’s rich supplies of oil or critical minerals used in smartphones and electric car batteries.

“They are just bad, first and foremost, because you can’t price the assets properly,” Akinwumi Adesina said in an interview with The Associated Press in Lagos, Nigeria, last week. “If you have minerals or oil under the ground, how do you come up with a price for a long-term contract? It’s a challenge.”

Linking future revenue from natural resource exports to loan paydowns is often touted as a way for recipients to get financing for infrastructure projects and for lenders to reduce the risk of not getting their money back.

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41586-024-07208-3

DOI for the highseas: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07208-3

> Adaptive foraging along dry-season waterholes would have transformed seasonal rivers into ‘blue highway’ corridors, potentially facilitating an out-of-Africa dispersal and suggesting that the event was not restricted to times of humid climates. The behavioural flexibility required to survive seasonally arid conditions in general, and the apparent short-term effects of the Toba supereruption in particular were probably key to the most recent dispersal and subsequent worldwide expansion of modern humans.

In order to contribute to restoring the debt sustainability of the Federal Republic of Somalia, Paris Club creditors committed to cancel USD 1.2 billion in nominal terms under the Enhanced HIPC Initiative framework.

In addition, Paris Club creditors confirmed their willingness to grant additional debt cancellation on a bilateral basis for an amount of USD 815 million.

The Paris Club consensus and the expected additional bilateral efforts would result in a reduction of more than USD 2.0 billion, representing 99% of the debt of the Federal Republic of Somalia owed to Paris Club members as of January 2023.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9754345

The lawsuit was filed in Washington, D.C. by nongovernmental organization International Right Advocates. It alleged that two mining companies, British company Glencore and Chinese company Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt, supplied cobalt to the companies.

The tech giants who purchased the cobalt were “aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo mines.

In February, Ethiopia’s federal parliament extended the state of emergency in Amhara region, which had been in place since August and affords the government sweeping powers. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that four of the eight journalists in detention as of early 2024 were detained under these emergency powers.

These latest arrests demonstrate that in Ethiopia today, no one is safe from arbitrary arrest and detention. Ethiopia’s long-time partners should condemn the spate of wrongful detentions and challenge the government’s growing intolerance of peaceful dissent.

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9595787

Ten years into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, the expansion of corporate investments in the global agri-food system has reached new heights. As evidenced by China’s plans in agriculture, fisheries and e-commerce in Africa and Asia, it is hard to find anything “green” or small-scale about the BRI.

China seems to be caught in a vicious cycle: the more its BRI expands with its large-scale agricultural techno-fixes for the profit of a few large Chinese conglomerates, the more dependent it becomes on food imports, increasingly undermining its own food sovereignty.

[Edit typo.]

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/9489915

The 7,600 tonnes of wheat flour donated by Ukraine will be provided to Sudan families, many of whom have fled their homes due to the fighting and are struggling every day to meet their food needs, the UN says.

The shipment was made possible by the German Federal Foreign Office, which covered the entire €15 million operating costs, including the transportation of the wheat from Ukraine to Sudan and the implementation and distribution within the country.

At the end of December, a civil claim was filed against Fresh Del Monte by a group of human rights organisations on behalf of 10 individuals, who alleged they were stabbed, stoned, tortured and raped by the company’s guards.

Del Monte, whose fresh fruit is a global staple, is the largest exporter of Kenyan produce to the world, and one of the East African country’s biggest employers.

> It’s important, though, to distinguish the position of the African Union from the position of individual member states. So, while the union itself has been consistent and has always held the line that Palestinian independence was an integral part of the African Union’s foundational documents and foundational position in international relations, various African nations — because there is no impetus from the African Union for there to be always a single position within each country, various African nations do have different relationships with both Israel and Palestine. So, for example, while every single country in Africa except one recognizes the state of Palestine, the recognition of the state of Israel has varied. There was a time after that 1972 war where African nations wholesale declared that they would not recognize the state of Israel, but that has changed considerably.

> The statement issued by the U.S. Department of State on 17 February 2024 fundamentally distorts these realities, and stands in puzzling contradiction with the substance and tone of the confidence-building process initiated by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in November 2023, which created a productive framework for de-escalation. Rwanda will seek clarification from the U.S. Government to ascertain whether its statement represents an abrupt shift in policy, or simply a lack of internal coordination.

> An Abbey spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper: “The Dean [David Hoyle] and Chapter has decided in principle that it would be appropriate to return the Ethiopian tabot to the Ethiopian Church. We are currently considering the best way to achieve this, and we are in ongoing discussions with representatives of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. This is a complex matter, and it may take some time.”

Boko Haram has targeted schools as part of its campaign of atrocities in north-eastern Nigeria since 2010. It has carried out massacres and multiple abductions, including 2014’s killing of 59 schoolboys, the kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok in 2014 and 101 girls in Dapchi in 2018.

Between 2013 and 2018, according to the UN, Boko Haram abducted more than 1,000 children, using them as soldiers and domestic or sex slaves. Amnesty International has estimated that 1,436 schoolchildren and 17 teachers were abducted between December 2020 and October 2021.

"This is the Russian state coming out of the shadows in its Africa policy," says Jack Watling, land warfare specialist at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) and one of the report's authors.

According to Dr Watling, "there was a meeting in the Kremlin fairly shortly after Prigozhin's mutiny, in which it was decided that Wagner's Africa operations would fall directly under the control of Russian military intelligence, the GRU".

"The narrative that Russia is pushing [in Africa] is that Western states remain fundamentally colonial in their attitude," says Dr Watling. "It's very ironic because the Russian approach, which is to isolate these regimes, capture their elites and to extract their natural resources, is quite colonial."

The fundamental change lies in "the overtness with which Russia is pursuing its policy", Dr Waitling added. Prigozhin's Wagner Group had always provided Russia with a level of plausible deniability in operations and influence abroad.

Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many in the Western security apparatus say that Russia's mask has slipped.

Girls who become parents often experience discrimination, stigma, and a lack of support and accommodation that makes juggling school and childcare responsibilities impossible. The lack of free education pushes many girls from the poorest households out of school.

Carved wooden figure at Venice Biennale in Europe aims to spark debate about colonial blindspots in the art world.

While the influx of Chinese capital has boosted economic growth in many countries, concerns surrounding human rights abuses, opaque practices, and environmental degradation cast a long shadow over China’s involvement. China holds a lot of African debt (around $153 billion), and some analysts argue it is designing loans to induce debt and strengthen its grip on the continent.

It is essential that China and the African nations also uphold international labor standards by guaranteeing fair wages, safe working conditions, and respect for workers’ rights in all projects. Additionally, local communities should participate in the planning and decision-making, respecting their concerns and minimizing displacement.

There is no specific law in Somalia against domestic violence.

In 2018, a comprehensive UN-backed sexual offences bill was introduced but it has not yet been passed by parliament.

Rating agency Moody’s says Kenya will need $3 billion in annual external financing to meet its external debt service needs after 2024. These needs include nearly $2 billion per year owed to private creditors and Chinese bilateral creditors, two groups for which refinancing can come at a higher cost of borrowing and lack predictability.

Apart from a new eurobond issuance, Kenya has had substantial foreign currency inflows in recent months from multilateral creditors, and also from bilateral and commercial creditors.

IMF approved sixth review of Kenya’s Extended Fund Facility and the Extended Credit Facility disbursing $624.5 million in January, and the World Bank is expected to provide Kenya between $1 billion and 1.5 billion under its Development Policy Operation before 2024 eurobond maturity.

Other external financing sources are less certain, but the government has raised funding from the syndicated loan market and could receive additional loans from bilateral creditors, which would boost Kenya’s international reserve position from around $7 billion currently, or about four months of import coverage.

He was killed alongside his coach, Rwanda's Gervais Hakizimana, in a car on a road in western Kenya on Sunday.

Kiptum made a breakthrough in 2023 as a rival to compatriot Eliud Kipchoge - one of the greatest marathon runners.

And it was in Chicago last October that Kiptum bettered Kipchoge's achievement, clocking the 26.1 miles (42km) in two hours and 35 seconds.

The two athletes had been named in Kenya's provisional marathon team for the Paris Olympics later this year.

Senegal is in the midst of its worst political upheaval in decades after the president postponed this month’s election. More than 200 opposition politicians and protesters have been arrested, and the government has shut down some internet access, amid what the decision’s opponents are describing as a coup.

“This is just the latest step in a string of human rights abuses,” says Amnesty International researcher Ousmane Diallo, who says President Macky Sall's latest anti-democratic move is characteristic of an increasingly repressive regime.

Financial technology (fintech) allows people with a mobile phone and internet connection to more safely buy basic groceries, settle bills, and receive money from abroad – easing some of the hardships. These apps have been available for over a decade in Sudan, with nearly all public sector workers paid digitally.

But they are now more than just a convenience to millions of Sudanese, their lives upended by nine months of fighting between the regular army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.

People transact as much as they can online to avoid navigating embattled neighbourhoods or the risk of carrying physical currency, and to cope with the reduced operating hours of the few bank branches that manage to remain open.

An investigation has uncovered claims that apparent representatives of the company made multiple approaches to witnesses of a December 2023 confrontation between Del Monte guards and pineapple thieves that led to the deaths of four men. Three people approached allege that Del Monte staff offered money and jobs in exchange for signing statements that supported the company’s version of events.

Despite Ethiopia’s outlawing of physical cryptocurrency exchange, the country welcomes Bitcoin mining operations.

Bitcoin mining has become increasingly popular in Ethiopia since China expelled the industry from its territory in 2021.

After the prohibition was lifted, the largest corporations in China dispersed worldwide in search of new locations that would accommodate their energy-intensive business practices.

When cargo containers containing powerful mining computers appeared near electricity substations associated with the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam last spring, that journey brought many individuals to Africa.

A total of 28 insurers have so far declared they will not insure Eacop following pressure from climate activists.

The 1,443-kilometre pipeline from Hoima in western Uganda to the Tanzanian Indian Ocean port of Tanga, is majority-owned (62 percent) by French oil giant TotalEnergies and state oil companies of China, Uganda and Tanzania.

Eacop is planned to pass through areas of sensitive ecological importance, including national parks and wildlife reserves. There has been criticism from international environmentalists.

According to Dickens Kamugisha, executive director of the Kampala-based Africa Institute for Energy Governance (Afiego), the Ugandan government is likely to lower its standards and offer attractive terms because it’s heavily indebted.

“The government currently has over $25 billion in debts, 80 percent of which has been accumulated during the time when it’s been pursuing these oil projects. The government is now desperate that it is likely that it will lower its expectations to attract investors,” Mr Kamugisha said.

The arrests came just three weeks after seven activists from another anti-pipeline group, Students against Eacop Uganda, were arrested and detained under similar circumstances, by the same judge. They spent almost four weeks in maximum security and will also appear in court on Wednesday charged with common nuisance. If convicted, they face a custodial sentence of 12 months.

"It is not normal to detain suspects for even a day for a common nuisance charge,” said attorney Ronald Samuel Wanda, who is representing 15 pipeline protesters. “These arrests are arbitrary … Arresting those protesting peacefully demonstrates that the government of Uganda does not respect its own constitution.”

French oil giant Total and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation are on the cusp of building a massive crude oil pipeline right through the heart of Africa – displacing communities, endangering wildlife and tipping the world closer to full-blown climate catastrophe.

International rights groups have documented those speaking out against the oil pipeline.

> “Despite political and economic challenges, 2023 saw air cargo markets regain ground lost in 2022 after the extraordinary Covid peak in 2021. Although full-year demand was shy of pre-Covid levels by 3.6 percent, the significant strengthening in the past quarter is a sign that markets are stabilising towards more normal demand patterns,”