12 May 2022
Ghana: Consumer price inflation has reached 23.6% year-on-year at in April, up from 19.4% in March. That is the highest level in more than a decade. “Trade unions have called on the government to give public sector workers a 20% cost of living allowance, an increase in the minimum wage and the removal of petroleum taxes.”
BBC Africa Live 12 May 2022. 5:11
10 African languages added to Google Translate: Several African languages were already available on Google Translate, amongst them Amharic, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and Somali. 10 more African languages have now been added: Bambara (Mali, Burkina Faso), Ewe (Ghana, Togo), Krio (Sierra Leone), Lingala (central Africa incl. DRC), Luganda (Uganda, Rwanda), Oromo (Ethiopia), Sepedi (South Africa), Tigrinya (Eritrea, Ethiopia), Tsonga (South Africa), Twi (Ghana). Don’t expect perfect translations, at least for the time being, but a good basis to work from.
BBC Africa Live 11 May 2022. Posted at 19:27
South Sudan: The 2018 peace agreement has reduced violence in the civil war that had started in 2013, but implementation of the agreement has run into problems. There is little progress in the writing of the constitution, the UN’s mission’s role is not clear and the details and the timetable for elections have not been agreed upon. Nor is the context in any way conducive to free and fair elections. What a review of the UN mission concluded in 2020 still holds true: “achieving durable and inclusive peace in South Sudan requires addressing deeply entrenched power dynamics and political systems that have primarily fuelled violence rather than served to protect citizens and create conditions for them to prosper.” With the end of the transition period not even a year ahead, this will not be achieved. On top of that, elections could prove divisive. With its winner-takes-all-approach, “introducing electoral competition into war-torn and deeply divided societies has often (…) sharpened and exacerbated conflict rather than mitigated it.” The article suggests that, beyond continuing with the UN mission’s strategy of brokering local peace deals, “a formula for power sharing, irrespective of who wins, should be worked out before elections are held.” If not, increased violence or the return to full-scale civil war could result.
https://theconversation.com/peacekeeping-in-south-sudan-its-a-race-against-time-for-the-un-182442
Rwanda: Protais Mpiranya, who had played a major role in the 1994 genocide as the then head of the presidential guard (he is thought to have ordered the murder of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and other moderate senior Rwandan leaders and also of 10 Belgian UN peacekeepers), had been indicted more than 20 years ago by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He has now been confirmed to have died in Zimbabwe in 2006.
BBC Africa Live 12 May 2022. 15:26
Rwanda: ISS’ senior researcher Liesl Louw-Vaudran will on 18th of May discuss on Zoom with author and journalist Michela Wrong who’s book Do not disturb – the story of a political murder and an African regime gone bad ”deals with the complex web of loyalties and political intrigue in Rwanda and beyond”.
https://issafrica.org/events/rwanda-african-success-story?utm_source=BenchmarkEmail&utm_campaign=ISS_Weekly_FR&utm_medium=email
Uganda: Museveni’s regime at its most typical: Dr Kizza Besigye, many times unsuccessful opposition candidate at presidential elections, “was blocked from leaving his home as he attempted to start protests against the government over the rising cost of living.”
BBC Africa Live 12 May 2022. 13:46
11 May 2022
South Sudan: The Dinka represent about 35%, the Nuer about 16% of South Sudan’s population. President Kiir belongs to the Dinka, Vice-President Machar to the Nuer. Unlike John Garang de Mabior, “the charismatic SPLM leader who envisioned a united Sudan where South Sudanese had equal political and economic rights along North Sudanese”, both Kiir and Machar – though belonging to SPLM – always wanted South Sudan’s independence. To this day, they are ideologically close. Garang died in 2005, after signing the historic peace agreement with Sudan and Kiir took over as president of SPLM and later Sudan with Machar becoming Vice-President. Things had begun to turn sour between the two when Machar had broken away from the SPLM in 1991 to form an opposition rebel movement, the so-called SPLM-Nasir faction which was partly instrumentalised by Khartoum to weaken SPLM. During the Bor massacre, for example, Nasir troops killed thousands of Dinka civilians. This forms the background to the ongoing rivalry between Kiir and Machar, a rivalry that is about power and the claim to national leadership and has made the two “pivotal figures in negotiating and agreeing, disagreeing and breaking peace agreements over most of South Sudan’s first decade as an independent nation”? Independence that was finally achieved in 2011. Civil war has plagued the country ever since 2013.
https://theconversation.com/kiir-and-machar-insights-into-south-sudans-strongmen-182522
Togo: A terrorist attack by about 60 gunmen on motorbikes at Kpinkankandi in the country’s north has killed 8 and wounded 13 soldiers. With an attempted attack having been foiled in November, “(t)his is thought to be the first deadly attack by Islamist militants in Togo”.
BBC Africa Live 11 May 2022. 16:30
Mali/Germany: A week after announcing that it would no longer take part in the EU military training mission in Mali, Germany has announced that it will increase its contribution to the UN mission in Mali by 300 to 1,400 soldiers.
BBC Africa Live 11 May 2022. 14:06