3 April 2021
Mozambique: “(O)ffshore exploration in the Cabo Delgado area includes Africa’s three largest LNG projects. These are the Mozambique LNG Project (involving Total and previously Anadarko) worth $20 billion; the Coral FLNG Project (involving Eni and Exxon Mobil) worth $4.7 billion; and the Rovuma LNG Project (involving Exxon Mobil, Eni and CNPC) worth $30 billion.” Production, supposed to start in 2024, was meant to boost Mozambique’s entire economy and that of its northernmost part in particular. So far, people of Cabo Delgado have not benefitted in any way. Some, on the contrary, were relocated to make room for infrastructure for the LNG development. Since 2017, Ansar al-Sunna aka Al-Shabaab, has been posing a growing security threat, displacing 670,000 people, temporarily bringing the port city Mocimboa da Praia under its control in 2020 and now attacking Palma in the immediate vicinity of the LNG project.
https://theconversation.com/offshore-gas-finds-offered-major-promise-for-mozambique-what-went-wrong-158079
2 April 2021
Egypt/Nawal El Saadawi: In this article, Professor Omnia Amin, who calls the recently deceased Nawal El Saadawi her “mentor, mother and friend” writes a very personal homage.
https://theconversation.com/an-egyptian-woman-who-dared-the-nawal-el-saadawi-i-knew-158135
Egypt/Nawal El Saadawi: All her life, Nawal El Saadawi fought against patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism. After graduating as a doctor (psychiatrist), working as a countryside physician “(s)he witnessed first-hand the harmful consequences of entrenched patriarchal practices such as female genital cutting and defloration inflicted on the bodies of poor village women”. But she didn’t think the ‘barbaric’ practice made Arab or African women all that different, she “insisted that all women are circumcised if not physically then ‘psychologically and educationally’.”
In the 1970s, she wrote a series of feminist manifestos that made her well-known, first of all Women and Sex in 1971. “In it, she condemned the violence committed against women’s bodies including virginity tests, honour killings, wedding night defloration and genital cutting.” “Soon after publication, she lost her job and the magazine she had founded was closed down.” She wrote “with the authority of a physician, the knowledge of an intellectual and the passion of an injured woman.”
Prison or death threats by islamists never made her relent or give up. “Unwaivering, she ran against Mubarak in the 2004 presidential elections. During the 2011 uprising that deposed Mubarak, El Saadawi, in her 80s, held seminars in tents in Tahrir Square to radicalise a new generation.”
https://theconversation.com/nawal-el-saadawis-intellectual-life-reflected-eight-decades-of-arab-society-and-culture-157972
Mali: 4 UN peacekeepers have been killed today Friday in an attack on a camp run by Chadian peacekeepers in Aguelhok. In another attack, two Malian soldiers were killed and six injured by suspected Islamist militants in Diafarabé in central Mali.
BBC Africa Live 02 April 2021. 15:35