U.S. Gives More Attention to Africa

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Given Africa’s many problems, any interest shown by a major power can only prove helpful. American Secretary of State Antony Blinken went on a four-country tour of Africa January Jan. 21-26, to underscore that Washington is committed to deeper relations with the continent despite global crises elsewhere.

Visiting Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Angola, he emphasized continued U.S. interests. Key priorities included bolstering security partnerships and enhancing health and economic development.

The U.S. is concerned about stability in the Sahel region of west Africa following coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Niger since 2020. The French military withdrawal from the Sahel and the end of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali last December have heightened concerns over regional security.

Russia’s powerful Wagner Group of mercenaries has been deployed to Mali, the Central African Republic, and Burkina Faso. A delegation visited Moscow recently from Niger, whose military last year toppled President Mohamed Bazoum.

“Our futures are linked, our prosperity is linked, and African voices increasingly are shaping, animating and leading the global conversation,” Blinken said as he opened talks in Cape Verde.

He called the small country, a Portuguese-speaking archipelago of around 500,000 people that has cooperated with the U.S. on law enforcement and naval stops, a “beacon of stability” and a “strong, principled voice.”

Though much of the continent has been uneasy about the billions of dollars in Western aid to Ukraine, Cape Verde’s Prime Minister Jose Ulisses Correia e Silva told Blinken that his country “strongly condemns” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Blinken toured the port in the capital Praia, expanded as part of nearly $150 million given to Cape Verde through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which grants American aid to countries that meet democratic standards.

Blinken’s visit to Ivory Coast was seen as reflecting U.S. interests in its stability. In the capital Abidjan, he hailed the Ivory Coast’s stand against last year’s coup in Niger and its approach of “building security together” by investing economically to combat rebel violence in northern areas bordering Mali and Burkina Faso. “I think that can serve as a very powerful model for other countries.”

The Ivory Coast has not experienced a major armed attack in two years, despite being bordered by Sahel countries fighting insecurity. The United States plans to provide $45 million in new funding to aid Ivory Coast and its neighbours in preventing conflict and promoting stability amid regional threats. Food security was also high on the agenda during the talks with President Alassane Ouattara.

Nigeria is the largest country by population and economy in sub-Saharan Africa, and the dominant political, economic, and military power in the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS. The State Department emphasized that Blinken would “highlight how the United States has accelerated the U.S.-Africa partnership” regarding climate, food, and health security.

The U.S. maintains a significant security partnership with Nigeria in its counterterrorism operations against both Boko Haram and the Islamic State’s West Africa Province. Between 2000 and 2022, Washington provided, facilitated, or approved more than two billion dollars in security aid and weapons and equipment sales to Nigeria.

The U. S. is the largest foreign investor in Nigeria, and Blinken met with President Bola Tinubu and Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar to discuss economic opportunities, trade, and countering terrorism.

Angolans have been struggling with drought for 40 years, and almost thirty years of civil war from 1975 to 2002 have left a country littered with mines. Although it is rich in oil and diamonds, most of the 37 million Angolans live in poverty.

But the main reason why the U.S. is engaging Angola is because of the Lobito Corridor rail link that connects mining areas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia’s Copperbelt province to the Atlantic port of Lobito in Angola. Logistical bottlenecks in South Africa have had a negative impact on exports of copper and cobalt and this will help alleviate the problem.

The U.S.-funded Export-Import Bank has committed to a $900 million loan for a U.S.-made solar panel project along the rail line, the bank’s largest-ever investment in that kind of installation in Africa.

Historically, the former Portuguese colony has had close links with China and Russia, especially since Beijing helped reconstruct the Benguela railway after the Angolan civil war ended more than 20 years ago. This allowed Angola to connect to the rest of Africa, especially in trade.

“However, the relationship between Luanda and Beijing didn't progress as Angola had envisioned, and now is more sedate. Angola is therefore warming up to Washington,” according to Sanusha Naidu, a senior research associate at the Institute for Global Dialogue in Cape Town. Blinken’s visit is an opportunity to “to take over the space that China used to occupy.”

The strategy seems to be working: Blinken’s stopover in Angola followed a visit to the White House by Angolan President Joao Lourenco just two months ago. While military modernization and regional security issues were on the agenda, trade is also a major motivator for the U.S. which has an interest in using Angola’s railway network and Atlantic ports to shore up global supply chains for itself.

“Angola's economy is at least going to undergo some restructuring and having a strong partner like the U.S. can certainly help,” Naidu explained.

 

Major Crises in Africa Overlooked

 Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax] Chronicle Herald

For the second year in a row, the humanitarian agency CARE International has reported that all ten of the most under-reported world crises are in Africa.

From conflict in Angola to climate change in Zimbabwe, the publication of “Breaking the Silence 2023” provides evidence that the continent is buried beneath the weight of media attention focused elsewhere, in particular on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

The report singled out 10 African countries, including Zimbabwe, Uganda, Burundi, Zambia, and Senegal, that are suffering crises such as climate change, conflict, poverty, hunger, violence and political instability but are getting little news coverage. Issues such as hunger in Angola, chronic malnutrition in Burundi and high child mortality in the Central African Republic are disappearing from public view.

In 2024, about 300 million people worldwide will need humanitarian help, CARE International warned, with almost half of them in Africa.

The aid organization commissioned the media monitoring service Meltwater to examine five million online articles in Arabic, German, English, French and Spanish from January1 to September 30 of 2023.

From a list of 48 humanitarian crises affecting more than one million people, the ten crises with the lowest media presence were identified. They were all in Africa.

International media closure of foreign bureaus has been blamed for the underreporting; as well, the fatigue that has set in after decades of unending conflicts and humanitarian crises in some African countries.

Angolans have been struggling with drought for 40 years, there is a lack of clean drinking water, and almost thirty years of civil war from 1975 to 2002 have left a country littered with mines. Although it is rich in oil and diamonds, most of the approximately 37 million Angolans live in poverty.

An armed conflict has been raging in the Central African Republic since 2013, and twenty per cent of the population have been internally displaced or have fled to neighbouring countries. More than three million people have needed humanitarian aid for years.

Hunger is a major concern. In Zambia, 1.35 million people are affected by hunger and in Burundi, almost 5.6 million children are chronically malnourished. Many people in Mauritania and Senegal also suffer from hunger.

Meanwhile, one of the worst food shortages to have hit strife-torn Ethiopia in the past fifty years has forced the authorities in the northern Tigray, Amhara and Afar regions as well as the federal government to sound the alarm. Millions of citizens residing in these regions are facing the prospect of acute hunger and require emergency food assistance. In addition, many have been uprooted from their homes in search of food.

Although the administrations of the three regions, the relevant agencies of the national government, as well as international donors and humanitarian partners, have exerted concerted efforts to support those in need, the response so far has fallen woefully short of what is required.

As well, the UN’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has expressed alarm about cholera in Africa, with the situation in Zambia and Zimbabwe very serious. They are experiencing a rapid rise in the number of cases since the Christmas and New Year holidays, with 1,000 cholera cases reported a week in each. In Zambia, nine out of 10 provinces are reporting cases.

Since 2023, 13 countries in the eastern and southern part of the continent have battled one of the worst cholera outbreaks to hit the region in years, and as of Jan. 15, more than 200,000 cases, including over 3,000 deaths, have been reported.  

The key drivers are long-term poor water sanitation and hygiene conditions, exacerbated by changing weather patterns, climate change leading to floods and droughts, end-of-year festivities, inadequate community sensitization and late care-seeking behaviour for those that are affected.

“Children, unfortunately, carry the lion’s share of the affected,” Dr. Paul Ngwakum, the regional health adviser for UNICEF in East and Southern Africa, said. “For example, over 52 per cent of the cases in Zambia are children less than 15 years old.”

Of the countries he named as having an active outbreak, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Somalia, as well as Zambia and Zimbabwe, are in “acute cholera crisis.”

 

Ethiopia’s Troubles Mount

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

The troubles keep mounting in Africa’s second most populous state, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. There are insurgencies in parts of the country, and it also faces serious economic troubles.

Its 110 million people are divided by ethnicity and religion into 12 ethno-linguistically based regional states, plus two cities, setting the stage for decades-long disputes over boundaries, self-government, and identity. The three main ethnic groups, theTigray, Oromo, and Amhara, are violently contest how Ethiopia will be shaped.

Church and state have been intertwined since Orthodox Christianity became Ethiopia’s state religion in the year 340, and some two-thirds of its people are Christians. Another one-third practice Islam.

In recent years Ethiopia has seen the rise of ethnically based militias and horrific massacres of civilians, especially along the border between Oromia and Amhara, the two largest and most powerful regions.

During 2020, ethnic and political tensions grew. The first eruption occurred in Tigray province in northern Ethiopia, which started when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who came to power two years earlier, sent in government troops that November, after accusing the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) of attacking Ethiopian military camps. Eritrean troops also intervened on the government’s side. Prior to this, the Tigrayans had long dominated Ethiopian politics.

Ethiopian federal forces indiscriminately shelled towns and villages while Amhara Special Forces and allied Amhara Fano militias carried out extrajudicial executions in towns across the area. Most Tigrayans belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and their churches were looted, bombed and burned down during the two-year civil war.  Priests were killed and their female relatives gang-raped.

The conflict killed some 600,000 civilians, uprooted more than 1.4 million people, and left hundreds of thousands facing famine. Veterans of relief operations are comparing the crisis to the situation in 1984, when a combination of drought and war caused a famine that killed up to a million people.

The Tigrayan forces and Ethiopia’s central government signed a peace deal on Nov. 2, 2022, ending a conflict that had threatened the integrity of Africa’s second-most-populous nation. But the deal was met with deep suspicion among Amharas as they were excluded from the talks even though the Fano militias and Amhara special forces fought on the side of the federal army.

When the prime minister in August 2023 proposed dismantling the special forces in the regions and integrating them into the federal army to foster ethnic unity, the Fano launched attacks, triggering a state of emergency. Curfews were imposed on the cities of Gondar, Dessie and Debre Birhan to prevent the protests from spiraling out of control, before calm returned. In late September, the Amhara Popular Front, a nationalist group that supports the Fano, denounced “war crimes and crimes against humanity by the regime of Abiy Ahmed.”

While weapons fell silent in Tigray, another conflict flared up in the interior of the country where the Oromo and Amhara, who are Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, are battling each other, over an old quarrel that began escalating in 2022.

Oromia accounts for around a third of Ethiopia’s citizens, and many are Muslim, evangelical or Protestant rather than Orthodox. The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) has been accused of widespread atrocities against Amharas in the region, raising fears that it wants to drive them out. The Oromo and Amhara accuse each other of killing civilians.

“Much of the violence is taking place in the border areas between the two regions, as well as where Amhara and Oromo communities reside as minority groups in other regions,” according to Ahmed Soliman, an expert on the Horn of Africa at Chatham House, the London-based think tank.

For centuries, Ethiopia was dominated by the elites of what is today the northernmost provinces of Tigray and Amhara, while the Oromo have been striving for autonomy for almost as long. The northern elites perceived the Oromo identity and languages as an obstacle to the expansion of Ethiopian national identity.

Most priests in Oromia are from the highlands of Amhara and Tigray, which have traditionally dominated Ethiopian national politics. “Our people do not have opportunities,” explained one Orthodox bishop.

Since the settlement of ethnic Amhara communities in parts of Oromia in the 1970s and 1980s, there have been repeated clashes between the new inhabitants and the Oromo over land and resources. Those clashes have intensified dramatically since Abiy Ahmed’s government took office. He is the first person of Oromo descent to hold that position.

The war in Tigray had created a security vacuum in the rest of the country, which made it possible for the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) to escalate the conflict in Oromia. The region is now Ethiopia’s most unstable. Peace talks between Ethiopia’s government and the rebel group aimed at ending the fighting ended without a deal in November.

Justice minister Gedion Timothewos insists the Ethiopian government is committed to “accountability” and that it is pushing through “transitional justice” while assuring there will not be a “blanket” amnesty.

Abiy Ahmed rose to power advocating pan-Ethiopian unity and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts in bringing the country’s war with neighbouring Eritrea to a formal close. Today, the prime minister is spending $10 billion on a new national palace and more than one billion on the military.