Afreximbank arranges EUR 200 million syndicated bridge facility for Abidjan Port

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Cairo, 10 July 2014 – The African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has arranged a 200 million-Euro syndicated bridge financing facility for Cote d’Ivoire’s state-owned Port Autonome d’Abidjan (PAA) to enable the company expand facilities at the Abidjan Port.

                According to the agreement signed by PAA and the participating banks in Cairo and Abidjan, Afreximbank and Société Générale Cote d’Ivoire will each provide 50 million Euros while Banque Atlantique, through its group across Africa, will participate in an amount of 100 million Euros. Banque Atlantique will also serve as the local agent bank for the transaction.

                Information made available by the banks today showed that the funds would be used by PAA to finance advance payment and related costs for the expansion of the Abidjan Port, including the enlargement and deepening of Vridi Canal as well as the construction of Container Terminal 2 and a RoRo terminal by China Harbour Engineering Company ltd.

“Afreximbank is happy to be part of this effort by PAA to adapt the infrastructure at the Abidjan Port to the new demands of global trade,” said Jean-Louis Ekra, President of Afreximbank, after signing the agreement on behalf of the Bank. “By increasing the port’s handling capacity for containers, this project should enhance the position of the Abidjan Port as the gateway that connects the nearby hinterland West Africa countries to international markets.”

PAA, which began operations in 1951 following its creation in 1950, is responsible for the management of the Port of Abidjan. One of Africa’s busiest ports in terms of volume, the Port of Abidjan serves as a major international trans-shipment and transit traffic hub through which 70 per cent of the foreign trade of hinterland countries (Burkina Faso, Mali, etc.) passes.

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By 2020, 140 million girls around the world will become child brides. 

Another shocking fact: in sub-Saharan Africa, more than one third of girl children are married by their 18th birthday.

These girls are often taken from their friends, and their family.... See More

Ayoub  mzee  with  the  Hon  Bekir Bozdag -The  deputy  Prime  minister  of  Turkey

Opening Ceremony of the 23rd Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea -  2014

Ensure that outcomes of our partnerships don't undermine our continental agenda
- Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, AUC Chairperson

Malabo, Equatorial Guinea - 20 June 2014: The Chairperson of the African Union Commission has called for a clearly defined approach to continental partnerships. Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma addressed members of the AU Permanent Representative Committee as part of the 23rd Su... See More

You are invited to a panel discussion   Somalia Briefing Threats to food security & remittances  Monday 14th July 2014 at 5pm Degan Ali Executive Director, Adeso Sara Pantuliano Director, Humanitarian Policy Group, ODI Abdirashid Duale CEO, Dahabshiil   The food security situation in many areas of Somalia is critical. NGOs and humanitarian organisations striving to prevent a repeat of the 2011 famine have warned of a US$800m funding shortfall. In 2011, when an estimated 260,000 Somalis died as a result of the famine, remittances from the Somali diaspora played a vital role in preventing further loss of life. Today, Somali money transfer companies are finding it increasingly difficult to operate as they are denied access to banking facilities in the USA, UK and Europe. The discussion will examine food security, remittances and the links between the two with the aim of identifying potential solutions and facilitating new partnerships. Africa Research Institute, 55 Tufton Street, London SW1P 3QL   Drinks and light refreshments will be served Please note that attendance is by invitation only Registration is essential as space is limited Email info@africaresearchinstitute.org or phone 020 7222 4006

How M23 and Congolese army commanders benefited from $57m illegal trade in Kivu

For the 22 years Brigadier-General Sultani Makenga fought in Congo and Rwanda, he spent most of this time in North and South Kivu, obtaining connections within and outside the region as well as knowledge on financing rebellion. TEA Graphic 

By RICHARD MGAMBA

Posted  Friday, July 4  2014 at  11:57

IN SUMMARY

• With earnings from illegal mineral and charcoal trade estimated at $57 million annually, financing the M23 rebellion was easy.
• The M23 had a battalion monitoring the charcoal and timber business and collected money from the traders.
• Makenga also had a network of mineral dealers using Kampala and Kigali cities to transact their business. There was also another network: Arms smugglers within the Congolese national army.

Read Part I of the Congo crisis series: UN mission in Congo guzzles $1.4b annually as violence spreads

For the 22 years Brigadier-General Sultani Makenga fought in Congo and Rwanda, he spent most of this time in North and South Kivu, obtaining connections within and outside the region as well as knowledge on financing rebellion.

Having joined the army at the age of 17 as a Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) fighter in Uganda, Makenga who, until February 2012, was a colonel in the Congolese army, earned experience as a guerilla fighter in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

His rebellion, he said, was inspired by historical injustices committed against his people, the Banyamulenge, who had suffered from the politics of exclusion from the colonial times through the Mobutu and Kabila regimes.

“My fight is against injustice brought about by the Kinshasa regime,” Makenga told The EastAfrican. “I have been fighting all these years because we want peace and stability for our people and our country.”

READ: M23 General: Evolution of rebel leader at centre of Congo conflict

The Makenga generation believe that they are victims of a political conspiracy against the Banyamulenge in Congo, which was first initiated by the Belgian colonialists.

Presidents Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Desire Kabila continued to perpetrate the historical injustices against the Banyamulenge, Makenga said.

After fighting for eight years under Laurent Nkunda, a Seventh Day Adventist evangelist who abandoned the Bible for the gun, in 2009, the Banyamulenge secured a peace deal with President Joseph Kabila.

Gen Nkunda was captured by Rwandan troops in January 2009 as he tried to escape a Congolese-Rwandan offensive against several rebel groups in eastern Congo. Gen Nkunda had seemed “untouchable,” commanding a toughened rebel force that frequently humiliated Congolese troops. Some Congolese soldiers believed he had magic powers. He had a white lamb he named Betty, which was believed to “power” his rebellion.

A Rwandan journalist living in Canada told The EastAfrican in Nairobi how Gen Nkunda postponed an interview with him because Betty was seriously ill. “We waited for two days in the bush for the interview because his lamb was sick,” the journalist said.

Reporting about the arrest of Gen Nkunda, The New York Times’ Jeffrey Gettleman wrote: “The surprise arrest could be a major turning point for Congo, which has been mired in rebellion and bloodshed for much of the past decade. It instantly strengthens the hand of the Congolese government, militarily and politically, right when the government seemed about to implode… But it could also empower other, even more brutal rebel figures like Jean Bosco Ntaganda, Gen Nkunda’s former chief of staff who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.”

As Gettleman put it, the end of Nkunda’s era paved the way for the emergence of two “dangerous faces”: Ntaganda and Makenga, the men whose rebellion came to haunt Congo as well as the international community nearly three years after their commander’s arrest.

When the Nairobi Peace Accord was signed on March 23, 2009, Makenga and his former boss, Jean Bosco Ntaganda, agreed to be integrated in the Congolese army on one major condition: They would remain serving the Congolese national army in Kivu. But Makenga was suspicious and unco-operative following the arrest of Laurent Nkunda.

Hidden motives

“We knew President Kabila very well… He was desperate to win, so he needed a peace deal with the CNDP (National Congress for the Defence of the People) before the General Election. After the election he had hidden motives,” Makenga told The EastAfrican

According to the UN Group of Experts, senior commanders in the Congolese national army FARDC believed Makenga was given control over mineral-rich areas so as to co-operate with Kinshasa in the integration programme.

But he attributed this to his negotiation skills.

“I wasn’t bribed. I just negotiated for a better deal because I knew President Kabila and his people very well,” he told The EastAfrican.

When we asked one of President Kabila’s top security officials why the president agreed to give ex-CNDP rebels the lucrative mining areas just to court them into signing the Nairobi accord, he said: “The President and the people of Congo were committed to peace, and that is why we sacrificed our minerals to bring about lasting peace.”

The official who sought anonymity added: “We were desperate to secure peace, but remember desperate times call for desperate measures … it was a great gamble, but we had no choice.”

Part of the deal — apart from control of minerals — was to make Makenga a colonel in charge of Operation Amani Leo, which was aimed at fighting and disarming all militias in the Kivu region, including the Hutu rebels, FDLR.

To control the minerals business, Makenga had his man, Colonel Claude Mucho.

“FARDC officers interviewed by the Group maintained that Mucho had explicit control and direct financial interests in the gold mine at Matili and the cassiterite mines at Nkunwa, Nyambembe, Nduma, Luntukulu and Lukoma,” the UN Group’s 2010 report says.

But allowing Makenga and Ntaganda in the area in which they had been warlords for years was a grave mistake, because their power and support could not be neutralised during the integration process.

“They were integrated theoretically, but practically they remained active rebels, who used the opportunity to study the strength of the Congolese national army,” the Rwandan military officer told The EastAfricanin Kigali. “Neither side trusted the other but, for the sake of peace, they had no choice.”

Following the Nairobi peace deal in April 2009, ex-CNDP fighters underwent accelerated integration into FARDC and the national police, but the process lacked transparency.

While the CNDP leadership said it had 5,276 soldiers, the actual figure was 11,080, according to the UN group.

The ex-CNDP fighters in FARDC were an army inside an army that received orders from ex-rebel commanders instead of the FARDC top brass.

But there was no regional or international neutral body supervising the implementation of the peace accord.

“This was a failure for all of us who participated in the peace process,” said a UN diplomat.

Ghana’s Black Stars are finally out of the FIFA World Cup, following a 2-1 defeat at the hands of Portugal. The team’s exit, however, does not seem to carry the usual disappointment it normally does when they come crashing out of a tournament. According to Bright Kankam Boadu, a respected Ghanaian sports journalist, some Ghanaians were actually rooting for the Portuguese team during the game.

“You’ll be very much surprised to learn that there were a lot of Ghanaians who were supporting Portugal to win because of what was happening at the camp,” Boadu said to reporters.

Mr. Kankam Boadu says this is as a result of a myriad of factors, chief among them, the incident in the Black Stars camp that saw the repelling of Sulley Ali Muntari, and Kevin Prince Boateng, as well as the players insistence to be paid $100,000 each, before honoring the final Group G game against Portugal.

The team was bedeviled with a series of problems starting with a report by the UK newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, purporting that the FA boss Kwesi Nyantakyi, and some other officials, were involved in an abortive deal to fix matches in which the Black Stars were to play. Following that, there was an incident where the players boycotted training, and had refused to board the flight to Brasilia to play the game against Portugal, unless they were paid an appearance fee of $100,000 in hard cash.

It took the intervention of President John Mahama, and a subsequent airlifting of $3 million to Brazil to pay the players for them to honor the game. According to Kankam Boadu, this is what really infuriated Ghanaians to withdraw their support for the Black Stars.

“Most Ghanaians are very angry with the team, and I’m sure if the team should touch down in Ghana, it would probably take the intervention of the military or the police to stop them,” he said.

Kankam-Boadu said at a time when Polytechnic lecturers are on strike, and utility tariffs are about to be increased, Ghanaians found it unacceptable that the team should hold the nation to ransom.

“I’m sure you read about it, you’ve heard about it. The kind of hardships that Ghanaians are going through, the energy crisis, jobs, and all the things and people are wondering (why) players who are supposed to play because of the flag, are demanding monies to be paid to them before they don the national colors,” he said.

Ghanaians saw this attitude as unpatriotic and thus decided to withdraw their support from the team.

Kankam Boadu who was in the Black Stars camp in Brazil at a point, also added that the team did not play well because they had “other things apart from football” on their minds.

He refuted the notion making the rounds that the players had not been paid their bonuses, leading to them staging the strike. He said they had actually been paid all their bonuses, but they had demanded an appearance fee of $100,000 each instead of the $75,000 promised them by the government and the FA.

“The players have been paid every single bonus they are entitled to. The players had demanded that they should be given $100,000 each as appearance fees for playing at the World Cup. The government of Ghana decided that it was too much, because the country had a lot of challenges at this very moment.” He said the government offered $75,000, but the players refused the amount, and stuck to their guns to boycott the game until the president stepped in and authorized the payment of $100,000 to each player.

He also attributed the Black Stars loss to a serious lack of discipline. “The leadership of the team has totally lost control,” he said. Also noting that he observed the players refusing to adhere to camp rules, having their wives and girlfriends around, and even nightclubbing while in camp.

Brazil World Cup Fallout: Nigeria Football Federation President Arrested

Maigari who arrived Abuja early Friday with a depleted Super Eagles team and members of his board from Brazil where the Eagles played their final match with France on Monday was immediately invited into a waiting police vehicle and taken to an unknown destination for questioning.

The    President of the Nigeria Football Federation, Aminu Maigari, was whisked away by security operatives on arrival at the Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport, Abuja yesterday.

Maigari who arrived Abuja early Friday with a depleted Super Eagles team and members of his board from Brazil where the Eagles played their final match with France on Monday was immediately invited into a waiting police vehicle and taken to  an unknown destination  for questioning.

However, the Secretary General of the NFF, Musa Amadu  denied that the incident was an arrest, instead he claims  that Maigari was only invited for a chat, cautioning that the  situation shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. The secretary did not discuss the nature of the police chat with Mr. Maigari before he was eventually reAminu Maigarileased.

“Maigari was indeed at the police headquarters but only at the invitation of the Nigeria Police for a chat. Ahmadu said the meeting was conducted in “an atmosphere of mutual respect.”
“The NFF President, Alhaji Aminu Maigari had very useful discussions at Force Headquarters. He was never at any time detained by the police. It is necessary in order to put the records straight,” said Amadu.
 In a related development, members of Mr. Maigari’s board were on Thursday restrained from parading themselves as members of the NFF by a High Court judge sitting in Jos, Plateau State. The judge ruled in a case brought before by the chairman of Nembe Football Club, Ebiakpo Baribote, who went to court to contest the decision by the Maigari-led NFF board to ban him for 15 years from all football related activities in Nigeria.
The injunction also asked the Sports Ministry to appoint the most senior civil servant at the football house in an acting capacity as acting Secretary General, pending the determination of the suite on July 11.

NEPAD PLANNING AND COORDINATING AGENCY

Johannesburg, July 3, 2014:  NEPAD CEO Dr Ibrahim Mayaki has been appointed interim Chief Executive of the Africa Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). The decision was made at the recent AU Summit in Malabo Equatorial Guinea.

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Chairperson of the African Peer Review Mechanism Forum announced the appointment of Dr Mayaki who will steer the affairs of the APRM Secretariat for the next six months as it embarks on the process of integration into the African Union.

In his address to APRM staff today, Dr Mayaki said that his main function will be to see how he can help and support the Secretariat in building management systems so that when the new CEO takes over in January 2015, they should have a something solid to support their capacities.

Dr Mayaki said his six months at the helm of the APRM will be characterized by professional, transparent and coherent decisions. He announced a team of senior NEPAD staff, Mr Bankole Adeoye of Corporate Service, Fatou Ceesay Jallow HR, and Kossi Toulassi at Finance who will be key in supporting the APRM metamorphosis into an AU entity.

The CEO said this staff complement had the significant experience based on their important involvement in processes that the NEPAD agency went through to become an organ of the AU. In addition, his Senior Advisers - Olusola Akinbade for Governance and Professor Tandeka Nkiwane for Inter-Institutional affairs will form part of the co-team to work with the APRM transition.

Dr Mayaki paid tribute to significant results produced by the highly professional and specialized staff at the Secretariat and said some of these results have been used effectively by the NEPAD Agency in some of its programmatic work.

Established in 2003 under NEPAD, the APRM is an instrument to which AU Member States accede voluntarily. A country formally joins by ratifying the African Union Declaration Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) adopted in Durban in July 2002. The primary purpose of APRM is to foster the adoption of policies, standards and practices that lead to political stability, high economic growth, sustainable development and accelerated sub-regional and continental economic integration through sharing of experiences and reinforcement of successful and best practices.

African Union Heads of State and Government Adopt the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 3 July, 2014: The 23^rd Ordinary Session of the Assembly of African Union Heads of State and Government held in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea on 27 June 2014 adopted the Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa -2024 (STISA-2024) amongst others.

STISA-2024 was developed as a result of the review of the Africa Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA), following an inclusive participatory process involving policy-makers, prominent scientists, and researchers at home and in Diaspora; institutions and organizations including the AU Commission and the NEPAD Agency. The 8-member high-level panel which presided over the development of STISA-2024 was co-chaired by Professors Calestous Juma and Ismail Serageldin.

STISA-2024 will address six critical socio-economic priority areas, namely: eradication of hunger and ensure food & nutrition security; disease prevention and control and ensuring well-being; communication; protection of our space; live together – build the community and; wealth creation. These priorities cut across the African Union sectorial strategic frameworks and provide ample opportunity for synergies and complementarities that would be capitalized on during implementation, underscoring the role of STI as a multi-functional tool for Africa’s development.

The STISA-2024 is a decadal continental strategic framework for accelerating Africa’s transition to an innovation-led, knowledge-based economy within the overall framework of the AU Agenda 2063. It takes into cognizance the need to revamp STI infrastructure in Africa, enhance technical and professional competencies, and also provide the enabling environment for STI as prerequisites to achieve its mission. Flagship research programs and actions with estimated budget and funding sources will be elaborated to respond to the challenges along the key priorities’ impact areas by the scientific community and all relevant stakeholders.  Both prerequisite actions and flagship programs will take stock of existing initiatives and will build on existing program actions already identified in the Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA).

In their decision, the Heads of State and Government called upon the Member States, Regional Economic Communities and Development Partners to align, connect and use the STISA-2024 as a reference framework in designing and coordinating their STI development agendas and initiatives, to collectively contribute to Africa’s socio-economic development. This calls for a political will and financial commitment from Member States that goes beyond the Khartoum declaration of 1% GDP spending on research and development.

The AU Commission, the NEPAD Agency and their partners will continue to advocate and create awareness, mobilize necessary institutional, human and financial resources and also track, monitor and evaluate the implementation progress of STISA -2024.

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• Petitioning Ban and deny access for hunter Kendall Jones to African States. 

Help stop Kendall Jones from hunting in Africa.

1. 1. 
    
   2. Petition by
      Kieron Brown
      Cape Town, South Africa

Kendall Jones is an American born hunter who has entered the continent and has been hunting African wildlife under the facade of conservation. She has publicly stated that she hopes to have a television hunting show and she is using endangered and helpless African animals as a stepping to further her popularity on social media platforms.

She has already recieved much protest, peaceful or otherwise from a wide variety of people from all over the world on her social profiles, and has, on those platforms, visibly scoffed and shaken off those protests, claiming that protestors are misinformed, or simply the "sheep" to her "lion" morals.

With enough support globally we can take a step in the right direction with regards to animal conservation, and help put an end to practices such as these, in hopes of conserving what precious little is left of our natural world.