Africa – 31 October 2014
Sub-Saharan Africans worst affected by undernourishment
Africa is lagging behind in tackling hunger with reports showing that over 25% of Africa’s population suffer from acute undernourishment. Undernourishment measures the quality of food available, laying particular emphasis on protein and energy content.
According to the 2014 Hunger Map and a report titled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World: Strengthening the Enabling Environment for Food Security and Nutrition” jointly prepared by World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the number of hungry people has fallen by over 200-million since 1992. Mail and Guardian
President Ian Khama’s BDP wins election
The ruling Botswana Democratic Party secured 33 of 57 seats in Parliament, giving Khama another five-year term as president. Botswana’s ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) has secured 33 of 57 Parliament seats in national elections, initial results showed, putting President Ian Khama at the helm for a second five-year term. Residents, who voted on Friday, re-elected the BDP party that has ruled the diamond-producing country since independence from Britain 48 years ago. Mail and Guardian
Western Sahara: Moroccan shame at UN human rights council
The UN has over the past decades appeared to pursue a just solution to the crisis in Western Sahara, Africa’s last colony still illegally occupied by Morocco. But it now emerges that Moroccan diplomacy at the world body has employed corruption to push its agenda against Western Sahara.
The machinations undertaken by Moroccan diplomacy continue to be unveiled by the Moroccan hacker, who uses the pseudonym “Chris Coleman24” on his Twitter account. Through this account, details of the shameful strategies and conspiracies of Moroccan diplomats in New York and Geneva have been revealed. The information exposed by the mysterious hacker on the Moroccan actions within the office of Navi Pillay, the immediate former High Commissioner for Human Rights, disclose an unprecedented scandal. Navi served as head of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) between 2008 and 2014. Pambazuka
Ebola in Africa: A product of history, not a natural phenomenon
There is nothing inevitable about the Ebola epidemic now devastating parts of Africa. Like other disasters, it too is the product of history, of the decisions that governments have made in the past as well as the present.
Modern African history teaches, often tragically, the need to distinguish between what might be called natural phenomena from those that are essentially socio-economic-political. The droughts that ravaged many parts of the continent in the early 1970s were an example of the former. (I leave aside the issue of human actions and global warming.) As drought-stricken California presently shows, the famines and the tens of thousands of lives lost that came in their wake were not, however, inevitable. That horrific outcome was largely the product of the policies put in place by colonial governments and dutifully and sadly reproduced by post-colonial regimes. Pambazuka