Monday, 21 May 2012
Africa News Briefs
Global Information Network
South Africa, Host Of Climate Confab, Is Africa’S Worst Pollutor
Nov. 29 (GIN) – Delegates from around the world are streaming into Durban, South Africa, for the U.N.’s Conference on Climate Change. Ironically, this is also home of one of the worst polluters on the continent, the Eskom coal-powered national electric company.
State-owned Eskom's coal-fired power stations are responsible for 66 percent of the 6,000 tons of sulphur dioxide pollution spewed into the atmosphere daily.
Sulphur dioxide is dangerous to human health and to plants and corrodes buildings yet dirty and destructive coal plants are opening around the continent at a fast pace.
Prior to the opening of the Durban conference Tuesday, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, chair of the Africa Group of Negotiators for Climate Change, stated Africa’s concerns. “Africa wants an outcome based on science that is fair and honors the promises all countries have made in the U.N. Climate Convention and its Kyoto Protocol.
“African countries feel they have been “duped,” he stated at an earlier meeting, “because many of them have not seen the sustainable development benefits that were promised to them when they agreed to emission reducing projects under the Kyoto Protocol. Three countries – Japan, Canada and Russia – have already expressed reluctance to honor their promises and the United States repudiated its commitments a number of years ago.
“But the world cannot be held hostage by a handful of countries. Africa will not serve as the burial ground of the only legally binding treaty requiring those most responsible for causing climate change to reduce their climate pollution.
“We expect the polluters, and not the poor in Africa, to pay. Durban must deliver an agreement on finance... If we depart from promises made as recently as 2007, how can we trust what comes next? Africa is more than willing to play ball, but only if the other side does not keep moving the goalposts.” w/pix of T. Mpanu-Mpanu.
Nigeria Joins Uganda To Pass Homophobic Legislation
Nov. 29 (GIN) – Joining a movement fueled by a segment of conservative American evangelicals, the Nigerian Senate approved this week a bill criminalizing gay marriage, gay support groups and same-sex public displays of affection.
It was the latest attack on a minority already facing discrimination in Africa’s most populous nation.
The Senate increased the penalty for gay marriage from five years' imprisonment proposed in a draft bill to 14 years. The bill must be passed by Nigeria’s House of Representatives and signed by President Goodluck Jonathan before becoming law.
“Such elements in society should be killed,” said Sen. Baba-Ahmed Yusuf Datti of the opposition party Congress for Progressive Change, drawing murmurs of support from the gallery.
Gay sex has been banned in Nigeria, a nation of more than 160 million people, since colonial rule by the British. In some areas of Nigeria’s north where Islamic Shariah law is enforced, gays face death by stoning.
The bill’s penalties were debated this week at the National Assembly before a television audience to the occasional sound of laughter, sources said.
One senator worried the bill would hinder the tradition of Nigeria’s Igbo ethnic group in the southeast to have infertile wives “marry” other women to carry their husbands’ children. Another said gays suffer from a “mental illness.”
The Coalition for the Defense of Sexual Rights in Nigeria, in an open letter to President Goodluck Johnson, urged him to guarantee the safety of all human rights defenders including gays.
“We could not help but notice from the outcome of the public hearing on the Same Gender marriage Bill, 2011 that committee members had already taken a position on the subject. That was evident from their deliberate name calling and profiling of the groups or individuals opposed to the Bill.
“The experience has been denigrating and humiliating and does not conform to democratic principles of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, prohibition of discrimination, and fair hearing,” the group wrote.
Meanwhile, in Uganda, a court this month sentenced the killer of noted gay activist David Kato to 30 years behind bars. Kato's slaying came only months after his picture was published in an anti-gay newspaper next to the words "Hang Them."
Rights activists blame an increase in homophobia in Uganda on evangelical preachers. Val Kalende of Freedom and Roam Uganda, defending gay rights, said: “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S Evangelicals in 2009. The Ugandan Government and the so-called U.S Evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood!” w/pix of anti-gay children's march
Farmers Prepare “Fight Back” To Foreign Land Grabbers
Nov. 29 (GIN) – An international farmers’ conference in the West African nation of Mali this month drew over 250 participants from thirty different countries to oppose the practice of “land grabbing” by foreign investors.
Ibrahima Coulibaly of the national organization of Malian farmers said in the opening speech: “The land belongs to local communities and it has been like that for generations. Now, governments are pushing farmers off their lands. This is not acceptable. It is a denial of historic rights, rights that exist since hundreds of years, while many states exist only since the 1960s.”
“Land grabbing is happening everywhere,” said Renee Vellve of GRAIN, a farmers' support group. “The rights of family farmers, pastoralists, artisanal fishers and indigenous communities, are violated constantly and their territories are being increasingly militarized."
More then 60 countries have been targeted by hundreds of private corporations and dozens of governments. This international “land rush” affects as least 30 million acres in Africa alone, according to GRAIN.
Currently in Mali, some 800,000 acres of land have been leased by foreign developers or are under negotiation for lease. One farmer from Kolongo, in the Ségou region, said: “We have been living in our villages for hundreds of years, yet nobody came and told us about these projects. Then one day, this machine came and started to dig. They gave us a paper which we could not read... The paper said that we had to leave our land and our farms...They dug up a cemetery, they robbed us of our harvest and ruined our land. We organised a forum in Kolongo one year ago and we are still struggling for our rights, but we are really suffering.”
So-called land grabbing has been reported from Ghana to Kenya and was the subject of a study by Maurice N. Amutabi of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa and discussed at an international conference on land policies in East Africa earlier this month. w/pix of I. Coulibaly
Nestle Company To Investigate Charges It Uses Child Labor
Nov. 29 (GIN) - Nestlé, the world's largest food company, has announced it will investigate charges of using child labor on the farms that supply it with the cocoa that ends up in millions of chocolate bars.
Beginning in January, the Fair Labor Association, hired by Nestle, will send a team of assessors to Ivory Coast to map the cocoa supply chain. The group has conducted similar investigations in the textile, manufacturing and other industries around the world. But Nestlé is the first food company to open up its supply chain to FLA's scrutiny.
It's the first major move to combat child labor since the Swiss company and other major chocolate makers signed a U.S.-brokered agreement in September 2001.
The results will be made public in spring 2012.
Ivory Coast produces 35 percent of the world's cocoa. The nation's cocoa production hit a record 1.48 million tons last year despite a political crisis that almost brought civil war.
A report produced by Tulane University said last year that 1.8 million children aged 5 to 17 years work on cocoa farms in Ivory Coast and Ghana.
It said 40 percent of 820,000 children working in cocoa in Ivory Coast are not enrolled in school, and only about 5 percent of Ivorian children are paid for their work.
Comments
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@ Otile.
Submitted by Koboko-Dem! (not verified) on December 1, 2011 - 07:59.
Bro,
I hear you- loud and clear. I hope I will not have to fight a civil war- like my father of blessed memory, a man I am extremely proud of. But like him, if I must...
God bless.
Koboko-Dem!, My brother, I
Submitted by Otile (not verified) on December 1, 2011 - 01:31.
Koboko-Dem!,
My brother, I see what you mean. Take heart, all is not lost. You do not need to miss your Hausa friends anymore. There are plenty of them here in the East and Eko. Come back home or move down to Eko. Although I would like all Igbo to leave Hausa land for security reasons I would not like the Hausas living in the East to go. Having come to the East and seen our culture they have become good people. I like their company here and in Eko. You are safer in Niger Republic or Chad or Cameroon than in Northern Nigeria. Unfortunately the Igbo hard work and prosperity provokes envy and jealousy in the North, Souh West and particularly among Ijaws. Believe it or not another war is inevitable. This time everybody has known his enemy and scores must be settled.
@ Otile: E NO EASY, BRO(3).
Submitted by Koboko-Dem! (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 21:39.
Sure, a lot of ignorance persists in the North( no thanks to Modibbo at UBEC, and his likes) but that is also the case in the South. Like me, a lot of Northerners also believe in the Nigeria Project. What, I think, we must do is try our utmost to eradicate the ignorance that persists in our Country, in the North and South. And COMPLETELY exclude religion from our politics. However I worry about the eradication of ignorance becoming a reality- it is obvious to all that the cost of education is increasingly beyond the reach of the average Nigerian. This eradication of ignorance, I think, is the battle we MUST fight. And, God willing, fight it we will!
More blessings, my brother. And same for Ibrahim Saad.
@ Otile: E NO EASY, BRO(2).
Submitted by Koboko-Dem! (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 21:34.
Bro., for you, it might be straight forward but, for me, I grew up in the North; it is part of who I am. Am I supposed to suddenly and abruptly forget that part of me? Forget my Northern friends I went to school with? The friends I chased women and drank with? The friends that ate my mother's food, and vice-versa? My Hausa and Fulani brethren that grew up in the East must appreciate where I am coming from. Real talk, my brother.
@ Otile: E NO EASY, BRO.
Submitted by Koboko-Dem! (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 21:29.
Bro,
I hear you. And I must admit that you make a lot of sense on most subjects you care to comment on. My brother, I like believing in the Nigeria Project, impossible as it may seem. A Nigeria where equity and justice, is dispensed with all fairness regardless of trivialities, like ethnicity and religion. I like travelling from Kano to Lagos, to Enugu, to Makurdi, or anywhere else in I choose to visit in Nigeria. I like, and appreciate, the diversity. All I want is to be able to undertake such trips freely, on good roads and without fear of harm. That's all. CONT'D.
Koboko-Dem!, Oluwa maje.
Submitted by Otile (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 19:08.
Koboko-Dem!,
Oluwa maje. What are you talking about? Do not incite anybody to die a premature death. What are you laying down your life for, for corrupt Nigeria? Oluwa maje. You are on your own, dude. Nigeria is not worth dying for. I can see good reason for dying for Biafra or even Islamic Republic of Arewa, not Nigeria.
Banish that thought, my brother. Oluwa maje.
@ IBRAHIM SAAD
Submitted by Koboko-Dem! (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 17:45.
Bro,
It's insanity, simple as that. How on earth are we going to begin to reverse this trend, where we have semi-illiterates at the helm of our nation's affairs? Eh?
Ibro(hope you don't mind?), I am totally flummoxed, for real!
I am in the early stages of forming the opinion that some of us, the progressives, might have to lay down our lives for the greater good of the nation.
E no easy, aye?
More blessings to you, my brother.
@RE: A SENATOR?
Submitted by IBRAHIM SAAD (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 12:05.
GOOD COMMENT KOBOKO_DEM, BUT THERE ARE THREE LEGS TO THE OVEN. YOU CAN THEN ADD THE FOR HIRE JUDICIARY AND THE BOAT ADRIFT PRESIDENCY TO IT ALL. WHAT DO YOU SEE NOW? I LEAVE THE COMMENT TO YOU.
A SENATOR?
Submitted by Koboko-Dem! (not verified) on November 30, 2011 - 08:34.
Hear the man:
" “Such elements in society should be killed,” said Sen. Baba-Ahmed Yusuf Datti of the opposition party Congress for Progressive Change, drawing murmurs of support from the gallery."
Let's be clear, I DO NOT CONDONE HOMOSEXUALITY. Neither do I approve of wilfully inciting murder!
Senator Datti, you are a disgrace, how on earth did you make it to the exalted position of a Nigerian Senator?
Which prompted me to visit the NASS website: http://www.nassnig.org/nass/Princ_officers.php?pageNum_rs_senatorsList=0.... Clicking on the "view my senatorial district page" link of some so-called Senators, I was shocked by what I read. I shouldn't have, the torment is almost unbearable.
It is very clear to me now why our Nation is fast on it's way to becoming a failed State.
