Politics

6, April 2018

Spain: Pro-independence Catalans celebrate as Puigdemont granted bail ⁰

Pro-independence Catalans celebrated the decision by a German court to release on bail the former Catalan separatist leader Carles Puigdemont but also protested for the freedom of other jailed separatists in Spain.

The state court in Schleswig, Germany said the 55-year-old ex-president could leave a prison in northern Germany with a 75,000-euro ($92,000) payment. It wasn’t immediately clear when Puigdemont would be released.

In the town of Figueres, around 100 pro-independence protesters stood in silence for a half hour while wearing white masks with red crosses on their mouths. Demonstrators said the masks and crosses symbolize the oppression by the Spanish government.

The protest ended peacefully with a long round of applause.

(Source: AP)

5, April 2018

CPDM crime syndicate “wins” 90% of elective senate seats ⁰

Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM), the country’s ruling party has swept an overwhelming majority of seats in the senate after the March 25 polls.

According to official results from the elections body, ELECAM, CPDM won 63 out of the 70 seats available. The remaining seven seats went to the main opposition, Social Democratic Front (SDF).

CPDM won in nine out of the ten regions of the central African country with the SDFwinning only in one of the Anglophone regions – the North West. Seven other parties failed to win a seat.

Cameroon’s parliamentary system caters for 100 senators out of which 70 are to be elected by municipal councillors across the country. The remaining 30 slots are the prerogative of the president.

The senatorial elections marks the start of a busy electoral calender as it is set to be followed by council, legislative and presidential elections later this year. The respective dates are yet to be determined by the President.

President Paul Biya is expected to seek another term in office after over three decades in charge. The country is currently riled by secessionist elements in the Anglophone regions – northwest and southwest regions.

The secessionists have entered an armed phase of a struggle for independence. About twenty five security forces have so far been killed in guerilla style attacks. Government received over 40 separatist members deported from Nigeria, they included leader Sisuku Julius Ayuk Tabe.

Culled from Africa News

5, April 2018

Opposition candidate Julius Maada Bio wins Sierra Leone presidential runoff ⁰

Opposition candidate Julius Maada Bio has won a narrow victory in a run-off election to become Sierra Leone’s next president, according to official results by the country’s electoral body.

The National Electoral Commission announced at 10:00pm local time that Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) won 51.8 percent of a total of over 2.5 million ballots cast in the March 31 vote, beating out the ruling All People’s Congress candidate Samura Kamara, who garnered 48.1 percent.

Kamara, a former foreign affairs minister, and Maada Bio, who briefly ruled Sierra Leone as head of a military junta in 1996, were vying to replace outgoing President Ernest Bai Koroma, who cannot seek re-election due to term limits.

I feel happy about the results. I am here because my president Julius Maada Bio has won the election in this country.

Maada Bio is to be sworn in as president tonight at a yet to be disclosed venue.

“The new president will be sworn in tonight,” Chief Justice Abdulai Hamid Charm told Reuters.

SLPP supporters began celebrating in the streets of the capital Freetown on Wednesday evening in anticipation of the official announcement of results.

“I feel happy about the results. I am here because my president Julius Maada Bio has won the election in this country,” said Adolfus Kargbo, among a group of SLPP supporters chanting Maada Bio’s name.

Who is Maada Bio?

Julius Maada Bio, 53, has tasted the presidency before having served a military Head of State for about three months. He led the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) military junta government that lasted from January 16 to March 29 1996.

He has also tasted how it feels to be on the ballot paper, he was the Sierra Leone Peoples Party’s candidate for the last elections. He lost to outgoing Ernest Bai Koroma.

As a military ruler, he toppled his boss in the NPRC junta Captain Valentine Strasser in January 1996 but handed over to democratically elected Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of the SLPPafter the 1996 presidential elections.

He later retired from active service that year and moved to the United States to further his studies. He earned a Masters Degree in International Affairs from the American University in Washington DC.

He was born on May 12, 1964 and graduated from military academy in October 1987 aged 23. He has played part in peacekeeping ops by the United Nations famously in Liberia. He played a role in the 1992 coup and led the 1996 one before handing over after elections.

He returned from the U.S. to join the SLPP in 2005. Contested to lead the party but lost the bid. He was picked as party’s presidential candidate in 2012 polls and garnered 37% of votes to place second.

He is a Roman Ctholic married to Fatima Bio a practicing Muslim and a Gambian national. They got married in an interfaith ceremony in London in 2013. The couple have a child but Maada Bio has three other children from a previous marriage. The vice presidential candidate of the SLPP is Jalloh Mohamed Juldeh.

The largely peaceful election process has come as a relief for the country of 7 million people, who endured a civil war in the 1990s and whose economy was dragged down by an Ebola epidemic in 2014-15 and a global slump in commodity prices in 2015.

Source: Africa News

4, April 2018

Trump says he could have ‘a very good relationship’ with Putin ⁰

President Donald Trump says he could have “a very good relationship” with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, even as the United States and many European nations have expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats.

“Getting along with Russia is a good thing,” Trump said Tuesday during a joint press conference with leaders of three Baltic countries most concerned about the potential for “aggression” from Moscow.

“I think I could have a very good relationship with Russia and with President Putin, and if I did, that would be a great thing. And there’s also a great possibility that that won’t happen. Who knows?”

Trump made the comments as his administration raised the prospect of a White House meeting between the US and Russian presidents.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump and Putin had “discussed a bilateral meeting in the ‘not-too-distant future’” during their most recent phone conversation last month, and that the White House was among “a number of potential venues.”

Trump called Putin on March 20 to congratulate him on his reelection, stoking criticism he is overly warm with the Russian president even as the US intelligence has conduced Russia interfered in the 2016 US election.

During the White House summit on Tuesday, Trump said he was looking to expand business ties with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as their leaders have called on the US to take a tougher stance against Russia.

US President Donald trump speaks during a joint press conference with President Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia, President Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia and President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania in the East Room of the White House on April 3, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by AFP)

“The Baltic countries remain a key market for US aircraft, automobiles, machinery and medical equipment, and we welcome increased bilateral trade with all three nations based on the principle of fairness and reciprocity,” he said.

Trump told the foreign leaders that “nobody has been tougher on Russia” than he has been, noting he has pushed for increased military spending and energy production to beat Russia.

“We’re essentially now energy-independent. We’re an exporter of energy. That is not a positive for Russia,” he said.

“We are going to have a military stronger than we’ve ever had before by far,” he added. “That’s not exactly a great thing for Russia.”

The three states, along with the US, moved to impose new sanctions on Moscow in response to the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England last month, an attack that Western officials have blamed on the Kremlin.

The UK says the nerve agent Novichok had been used to poison the pair, claiming only Russia had the capability, motive and intent to be behind the attack.

Moscow has vehemently denied any involvement, saying the substance could have originated from the countries studying Novichok, including the UK itself, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Sweden.

The Trump administration announced plans to expel 60 Russian diplomatic officials it accused of being spies following the nerve agent attack against Skripal.

Despite diplomatic actions by his administration, Trump has not forcefully condemned Putin and Moscow for the incident.

Moscow has also expelled nearly 60 diplomats from different countries in retaliation.

Source: Presstv

3, April 2018

Egypt: Sisi re-elected in low-turnout election ⁰

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has been re-elected with 97 percent of votes, the same proportion that the former military commander secured four years ago for his first term but with a lower turnout, official results showed on Monday.

Turnout was 41 percent, despite efforts to get as many Egyptians as possible to polling stations during last week’s vote. Sisi had been virtually guaranteed a landslide win, confirmed by early tallies as voting ended on Wednesday.

The election featured only one other candidate – himself an ardent Sisi supporter – after all serious opposition contenders halted their campaigns in January. The main challenger was arrested and his campaign manager beaten up, while other presidential hopefuls pulled out, citing intimidation.

“Every credible opponent was either threatened, harassed, prosecuted or detained,” said FRANCE 24 correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

Sisi said he had wanted more candidates to run and that he had nothing to do with the opposition withdrawals.

The election commission said the vote was free and fair as it gave the results in a televised announcement on Monday.

Sisi won a total of 21.8 million votes compared with 656,534 for his opponent, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, whose tally was less than the 1.8 million spoiled ballots.

The lower turnout is a potential setback for Sisi, who suggested before the vote that he saw it as a referendum on his presidency rather than a genuine contest. Turnout in the 2014 vote that won him his first term was 47 percent.

“This came despite a very fierce campaign by officials to boost turnout,” said Kouddous. “You had officials using a mixture of cajoling and threatening and bullying to get people to the polls. In some provinces, you had police officers going door to door, instructing people to go to the polls. You had boxes of subsidised food with things like cooking oil and sugar being offered in poor areas for people to vote.”

Some voters said they were offered incentives to cast their ballots including money and food, local and international media reported, but did not say who had made the offers.

Officials said that if any such incidents took place they were not state-sponsored and extremely limited.

State media had portrayed failure to vote as a betrayal of Egypt.

“This wasn’t about voter attitudes or voter choices,” Kouddous said. “This was about the optics of their participation. It was really about political domination and … a fierce repression of civilian politics.”

Criticism

Critics say former general Sisi’s popularity has been eroded amid tough economic reforms, which have left most Egyptians worse off, and also an unprecedented crackdown on dissent.

His supporters say those measures are needed to stabilise the country, which faces a stubborn Islamic State group insurgency in the northern Sinai Peninsula and which was rocked by unrest after a 2011 uprising that ousted veteran leader Hosni Mubarak.

Sisi led the 2013 military overthrow of Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, after protests against Morsi. Sisi swept to victory in an election a year later with 97 percent of the vote.

The United Nations expressed concern over the crackdown on dissent, including media, which took place before last week’s vote.

Sisi’s main Western and regional allies have been mostly silent over alleged human rights abuses in Egypt.

During voting last week, the US embassy in Cairo said on Twitter it was “impressed by the enthusiasm and patriotism of Egyptian voters”.

Russia congratulated Sisi on his election win ahead of the official results, and regional ally King Salman of Saudi Arabia called Sisi on Monday to express support, saying his victory came as a result of strong efforts to combat terrorism.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

2, April 2018

Botswana inaugurates new president Masisi in smooth handover ⁰

Botswana’s new president, Mokgweetsi Masisi, used his inauguration speech on Sunday to vow to tackle youth unemployment in one of Africa’s most stable countries.

The swearing-in ceremony in parliament came after Ian Khama stepped down having completed the constitutional maximum of 10 years in office.

As the vice president, Masisi took over automatically, and he is likely to secure a further five-year term in elections in October 2019 when the ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) is expected to hold on to power.

Botswana prides itself on good governance and rule of law, and the carefully managed handover of power comes a full 18 months ahead of parliamentary elections in 2019.

Masisi, the former vice president, takes over a country widely seen as an African success story that has made good use of its lucrative income from diamond, beef and tourism.

It is rated as the least corrupt country in Africa by Transparency International.

But it has also struggled with rising unemployment rate of about 18 percent and an HIV epidemic.

“It is because of the peace and tranquillity that our leaders have sustained for so long that Batswana (people) have continued to enjoy relative prosperity,” Masisi said after taking his oath.

“One of my top priorities as the president of this country will be to address the problem of unemployment especially amongst the young people.”

He also pledged to improve treatment and prevention of HIV in a country with a 22 percent infection rate among adults.

Continuity politics

President Masisi, 55, is a close ally of Khama and a BDP veteran.

He is a US-educated former teacher, UNICEF official and education minister, whose father was also a cabinet minister.

“Despite its small size, Botswana continues to play an important role in the promotion of global issues such as respect for human rights, democracy, good governance (and) the rule of law,” Masisi said.

Khama, 65, completed a months-long national farewell tour last week, bidding goodbye to the country’s population of 2.2 million.

He earned a record for straight talking, often criticising leaders including US President Donald Trump and unlike many in the region neighbouring Zimbabwe’s then-president Robert Mugabe as well as Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila.

Khama led the BDP to landslide victories in two elections, although the party won less than 50 percent of the vote for the first time in 2014.

“Internationally, Khama positioned himself as a moral leader,” Matteo Vidiri, a BMI Research analyst, told AFP.

“(But) a slowing economy and increasing public discontent has damaged the narrative of Botswana’s ‘special character’, of a country being able to escape the ‘resource curse’.”

Four opposition parties have said they could unite for the 2019 election to try to unseat the BDP, which has held power since independence from Britain in 1966.

At a farewell event in his home village, Khama was showered with gifts including a 4×4 truck, 143 cows, hundreds of chickens, more than 415,000 pula ($44,000, 35,000 euro) and a fully-equipped luxury caravan.

His father, Seretse Khama, served from 1966 to 1980 as Botswana’s first president.

(AFP)

1, April 2018

France and the Ambazonian vigil at Nigerian Embassy in South Africa ⁰

For the past three weeks, an encampment of activists from Ambazonia, the English-speaking territory also known as Southern Cameroon, has been holding vigil outside the Nigerian Embassy in South Africa. The purpose is to demand the immediate release of leaders in their struggle with the French neo-colonial regime in Cameroon, and to shine a light on Nigeria’s betrayal of the Ambazonian people. In January 2018, Nigeria arrested and handed over several Ambazonian refugees to the Cameroonian regime, the second longest-running dictatorship in the world.

Cameroonian authorities have since announced that among those Nigeria handed to them was Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, regarded by millions of Ambazonians as their political representative in the struggle for their basic human rights. Ambazonia has been under military occupation by Cameroon since 1961, and, all this time, the people have been struggling for basic human rights and dignity. Tensions rose sharply in October 2016 in response to a strike by legal workers to defend the Ambazonian common law–based judicial system from the Cameroonian regime’s attempt to replace it with a French colonial court system.

In response, the Cameroon military used force. They deployed helicopter gunships to shoot live ammunition at protesters, executed hundreds and detained more than a thousand summarily and without charge. In direct response, some factions of Ambazonians have chosen to defend their communities with force. These acts have created a wave of refugees crossing the border to Nigeria in fear for their lives.

The UNHCR had registered 20,291 refugees as of March 8; community leaders on the ground count close to 60,000. Ayuk Tabe and 11 other Ambazonian leaders, who were betrayed by the Nigerian government, had gathered at the Nera Hotel, Abuja to plan a meeting with the UNHCR on the plight of the refugees when they were arrested. Nigeria’s handing over of these activists to Cameroon, clearly done under pressure from France, was a violation of the principle of non-refoulement, a fundamental pillar of international humanitarian law, which forbids a country receiving asylum seekers from returning them to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution. It has drawn rebuke from Amnesty International, the UNHCR, and even the US Department of State. Moreover, it constituted a devastating attack on the survival of the Ambazonian people.

Ayuk Tabe has recently emerged as a unifying figure that commands the respect and confidence of the Ambazonian community. This betrayal on the part of the Nigerian government is not just injurious to the Ambazonian people. In fact it is deeply harmful to Nigeria as well, and should be read as the most overt display yet of France’s calculated conquest of the whole of Africa.

Nigeria has always been the crown jewel of the French project to re-conquer all of Africa. Through a combination of underhandedness, blackmail and influence peddling ,France has meddled in Nigeria affairs since the eve of her independence. When the Biafran war broke out in 1967, France positioned itself as its international champion — serving as the main supplier of weapons and mercenaries to the Biafran army and declaring “Biafra Week” on March 11-17. Yet France declined to formally recognize Biafra — which was what they needed the most in their struggle.

Having blackmailed their way into huge oil concessions from the northern-dominated federal government with their support for Biafra, France then switched sides and betrayed the Biafrans to government. The spoils of this act were demonstrated four years after the defeat of the Biafrans, when a French oil company emerged as the biggest winner in the 1974 issuing of new oil leases by the Nigerian government. Today, some French institutions and operatives play an oversize role in the Nigerian oil and gas industry. Observers are not surprised that Nigeria is slowly becoming France’s gendarme in Africa. Evidence of this lies in the disjuncture between Nigeria’s response to Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, vs. to Côte d’Ivoire. Nigerian political leadership has never found the courage to criticise electoral fraud in Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, two French clientele regimes to Nigeria’s immediate eastern and south-eastern borders which can boast of the world’s longest-running and second longest-running dictatorships in the world. The forcible return of the Ambazonian prisoners, including Ayuk Tabe, is in keeping with this behavior.

French oil interests are the driving factor in the move to squelch the movement for human rights in Ambazonia. Were it to gain the attention it deserves, more than just Ambazonians would raise their voices for their fair share of the profits reaped by the French extraction industry in Africa.

Source: Vanguard Nigeria

1, April 2018

Turkey says French troops in Syria would amount to invasion ⁰

Turkey has warned France over bolstering its military presence in Syria, stressing that such a move would amount to an invasion.

“If France takes any steps regarding its military presence in northern Syria, this would be an illegitimate step that would go against international law and in fact, it would be an invasion,” said Turkish Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli on Saturday.

“Especially if they intend to support terror group elements or give direct or indirect protection with armed forces, this would be a really calamitous step,” he added.

Canikli’s remarks came in response to a Thursday pledge by French President Emmanuel Macron to further support US-backed Kurdish militants in northern Syria.

Turkey began the so-called Operation Olive Branch in Afrin on January 20 to clear the northern Syrian border of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a US-backed Kurdish militant group which Ankara associates with the homegrown Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighting for autonomy on Turkish soil.

Macron’s remarks also drew an angry reaction from Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bekir Bozdag, who said Friday that the promise to back the Kurds amounts to support for and legitimization of terrorist groups.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also denounced France’s stance as “completely wrong.”

Source: Presstv

31, March 2018

Pro Yaounde Southern Cameroonians left ‘skeptic’ after Atanga Nji visit ⁰

Skepticism dominates Cameroon’s English-speaking areas, even after the visit of the newly appointed Interior Minister Paul Atanga Nji. The minister visited Buea and Kumba in the South-West, as well as Bamenda and Batibo, two sub-regions in northwestern Cameroon.

The minister had said on Tuesday that he was bringing a “message of dialogue” to the restive southwest anglophone region, where the army is fighting separatists.

Atanga Nji, himself an anglophone, told state radio he was in the region to “bring a message of dialogue, a responsible dialogue, a dialogue with those who know that Cameroon is one and indivisible”.

But his visit has been met with skepticism, with some terming his mission as a ‘joke’ and an ‘illusion’ as RFI reports.

“He did not try to meet us and he talks about dialogue! But which dialogue is it,” RFI quotes an exasperated lawyer from Buea who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“He was content to see the traditional chiefs,” said a bitter teacher, who preferred to take refuge in his village because of the tension in Bamenda.

“Tension is brewing because we are approaching the presidential election and in fact, the government is doing nothing to resolve the crisis, “he continues.

The minister, the first anglophone Interior Minister, is unpopular in the English-speaking regions after declaring in early 2016 that there was “no anglophone problem” in Cameroon.

Two English-speaking regions, in the southwest and northwest, became part of the French-majority country after independence in 1960 and contain around 20 percent of the Cameroon population.

Tensions have flared since separatists proclaimed the autonomous republic of “Ambazonia” in October last year.

The country has had a tortuous colonial history that saw it pass from German rule to French and British hands, and the anglophone minority complain of having long been marginalised by the French-speaking elite.

The conflict between rebels and the army has become increasingly serious, as separatists urge the armed forces and government officials to leave the territory.

New separatist groups are emerging, while the Yaounde authorities have reduced their communications about the conflict to a minimum.

The unrest in the anglophone regions has prompted around 33,000 people to flee to neighbouring Nigeria.

Culled from Africa News

31, March 2018

Sierra Leone begins voting in presidential run-off ⁰

Sierra Leone’s electoral staff prepared polling stations in Freetown early on Saturday morning as voters queued for a presidential run-off which was delayed by claims of electoral fraud.

“I am here to vote for the process. I am here, again, so I can have a credible election and credible results that is why I am here to come and vote,” said Idris Kamara, a voter in Freetown, as electoral staff put up polling station signs and prepared the ballot boxes.

The run-off is between the main opposition leader Julius Madaa Bio of the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) and Samura Kamara of the ruling All Peoples Congress (APC) party.

Bio led with 43.3 percent in the first round of the vote with runner-up Kamara taking 42.7 percent.

(Source: Reuters)