Malawi’s former president, Joyce Banda, returned home on Saturday after four years of self-imposed exile, despite facing the threat of arrest over corruption allegations.

Banda, 68, fled the country in 2014 when she lost power after being embroiled in the so-called Cashgate scandal, in which government officials siphoned off millions of dollars of public money.

Banda only the second woman to lead a country in Africa arrived at Blantyre’s airport on a flight from Johannesburg around midday on Saturday, where she was greeted by hundreds of supporters of her People’s Party, said an AFP journalist at the scene.

“Mother is here, the lights should come back”, the crowd chanted. No police were present as she left the plane.

Her spokesman Andekunye Chanthunya had earlier said she would head straight to her home at Domasi in Zomba, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) away.

Local media have reported a possible deal between President Peter Mutharika and Banda ahead of next year’s elections.

Banda founded the People’s Party (PP) in 2011 after splitting from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is led by Mutharika.

Chanthunya told AFP that Banda would also address a political rally on Sunday.

“She remains the head of the PP. The question of whether she wants to contest for the presidency or not will be answered in due course, but we may get an idea of how she is thinking.”

Government coffers emptied

Police spokesman James Kaledzera has declined to say if Banda would be arrested, though he confirmed that a warrant issued last July remained valid.

Earlier this year, the Malawi Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) said it had no solid evidence against the former president, partially clearing her name.

The “Cashgate” scandal prompted foreign donors who provide around 40 percent of Malawi’s budget to pull the plug on aid worth around $150 million.

Ministers, civil servants and businessmen are accused of pocketing money from government coffers through ghost companies which did not provide any services to the state.

The biggest financial scandal in Malawi’s history helped push Banda out of power in the 2014 election, and Mutharika vowed to clean up the system to bring donors back.

The graft started in 2005, and more than $30 million was looted within only six months in 2013 shortly before it was uncovered, according to an independent audit.

Malawi, one of the world’s poorest and aid-dependent countries, will hold presidential, parliamentary and council elections in May 2019.

Banda came to power in 2012 when Bingu wa Mutharika, the current president’s brother, died in office.

She has spent much of her time abroad in the United States and her return has been postponed several times, most recently last year when the arrest warrant was issued.

Political analyst Henry Chingaipe said her influence was uncertain and she could struggle to play a major role in the elections.

“If she is coming home just to live, OK. But if she is coming to contest for the presidency, her party is in tatters,” he told AFP.

“The decision to leave the country for so long eroded trust in her leadership.”

The World Bank resumed aid to Malawi in May last year, providing an $80 million package and saying the country had “taken some very important reform steps”.

(AFP)

Suspected militants have reportedly killed over 30 people on Mali’s northeastern border with Niger amid escalation of violence in the country. According to the former Tuareg rebel group MSA and tribal leaders, the massacre occurred Friday, a day after another deadly attack in the same area that killed 12 people. “There have been 43 deaths in two days, all civilians, from the same community,” tribal leader Sidigui Ag Hamadi told AFP from the regional capital Menaka on Saturday.

“Our fighters are destroying their bases and wiping them out. They are targeting innocent civilians,” he added. Menaka governor Daouda Maiga said there were women, children and elderly people among the victims, but did not provide any figures.

The Tuareg rebel group called on the governments of Mali and Niger to take measures to ensure that “an immediate end is put to these abominable crimes” and stressed that it would “not give in to any intimidation.”

Two weeks ago, the UN peacekeeping mission in Mali, MINUSMA, said they had received “very serious” information that “summary executions of at least 95 people” had occurred during anti-militant operations in Menaka by “a coalition of armed groups,” including MSA and Gatia, but both groups denied having any role in the reported incidents.

MINUSMA has also expressed concern about an increase in “serious violations and human rights abuses against civilians, including cases of summary execution” in the center of the country.

The UN mission has 12,000 peacekeepers in the country. It has estimated that at least 180 civilians have been killed in Mali this year in at least 85 major violent incidents and armed confrontations.

The warning shows how militants have managed to infiltrate the relatively calmer regions of Mali where local grievances are high. Many fear the central regions, already awash with guns, can be turned into a new scene of violence some three years after the government managed to reach a peace agreement with some armed groups.

In 2012, unrest in Mali drew attentions in France, the former colonizer which still maintains a significant military presence in the country, when Tuareg separatists staged an uprising against the government.

The French military intervened under the pretext that the Tuareg movement had been exploited by terrorists of al-Qaeda. However, many parts of Mali still remain lawless while militants have managed to win the trust of locals in many villages by providing them with basic services and protection from bandits.

Source: Presstv

Liberia’s former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has spoken publicly for the first time about what she intends to use her time for as she settles into life after presidency.

The former Nobel Prize laureate and Africa’s first democratically elected woman president said she was going to continue with issues of women empowerment whiles advancing the cause of good governance across Africa.

“I will work with a small team of people to establish the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development, designed to support women as agents of change, makers of peace, and drivers of progress,” she said at a ceremony in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

The event was the leadership ceremony of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation which awarded her the $5m Mo Ibrahim Ibrahim Prize. Sirleaf in her address to participants at the 2018 Ibrahim Governance Weekend stressed on a range of topics from global, continental and local prospects and challenges.

She spoke at length about her “restless” journey in search of a route to serve her people which search she said led her to civil service and eventually to the office of the highest civil servant of Liberia for the past 13 years.

She reiterated the successes and challenges that she experienced and what lay ahead for the country she continually referred to as “complex, post-conflict society, on a continent of uneven progress, during a time of global uncertainty.”

Sirleaf’s political progress has been hinged on the support of Liberian women as laid out in her biography, “This Child Will Be Great.” In many parts of the book she credited the efforts of women groups in organizing support for her political campaign.

Other areas she touched on included corruption, civil service engagement, good governance, youth involvement in leadership and Africa’s continued march in search for deepening its democratic credentials.

Present at the event were head of the award foundation Mo Ibrahim, Rwandan president Paul Kagame and his Ivorian counterpart Alassane Ouattara. Former Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn as well as members of the Foundation’s award committee were all present.

Source: Africa News

Forty civilians have drowned after their boats overturned on a storm-swollen river while they were fleeing fighting in the northwest Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“As of Wednesday night, we recovered the bodies of 40 people” after their boats capsized, Jean Bakatoye, vice governor of South Ubangi province, said Friday. The number of the victims is expected to rise, the senior local official said.

“The toll is still provisional as other bodies were swept downstream,” Bakatoye said. The civilians were attempting to cross the Ubangi River, which marks part of the border with the adjacent Republic of Congo, in order to escape fighting between DR Congo troops and “outlaws,” Bakatoye said.

The events occurred in the remote border area of Dongo, after an army position was attacked on Sunday, he said.

“Several soldiers” were wounded, he said, although four witnesses said they had seen the bodies of two troops and four attackers.

Army reinforcements were deployed on Monday, prompting panic among villagers who feared a wider conflict, Bakatoye added.

Dongo was shaken by a revolt by the Enyele ethnic group in 2009, which was put down by the Congolese army the following year. Fighting killed an estimated 270 people and forced 200,000 others to flee their homes.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is suffering from growing insecurity. New conflicts are erupting as President Joseph Kabila struggles to maintain his grip on power after his constitutional term in office expired in December 2016.

Armed groups are active in the eastern provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu, which border Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania.

Violence has also erupted in the central region of Kasai. There a tribal chieftain known as the Kamwina Nsapu, who rebelled against Kabila’s regime, was murdered in September 2016.

Another conflict is flaring up in the country’s Ituri province between the Hema and Lendu communities.

Source: Presstv