Africa Business

Rare twins have been born to a Maasai giraffe in Nairobi’s national park, the Kenyan wildlife minister said Tuesday.

“This is an extremely rare occurence,” Najib Balala said on Twitter in a post accompanied by a picture of the mother watching over her offspring.

The world’s tallest species was listed as “vulnerable to extinction” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 2016 Red List of threatened wildlife.

Only about 117,000 giraffe remain in the wild, according to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. It said the numbers of the gentle long-necked giant in Africa have plummeted by 30 percent over the last 30 years, describing it as a “silent extinction”.

Kenya is home to three subspecies of giraffe, the Maasai, the reticulated and the Rothschild.

Nairobi National Park lies just seven kilometres (four miles) from the heart of the Kenyan capital, and is a tourist magnet for its wildlife including lions, leopards, rhinos and buffalos which graze against a backdrop of distant skyscrapers.

At 15 months, giraffes have one of the longest gestation periods for mammals. They give birth standing up, which means their calves drop just under two metres (six feet) to the ground. 

This startling introduction to life gets them up and running around in less than an hour. A newborn calf is bigger than the average adult human. 

Only a handful of twin births have been documented worldwide with most often not surviving. 

In the wild, giraffes can live up to 25 years, while in captivity they can survive more than 35 years.

Ghanaian trader Mohammed Biney was already struggling when the government passed a new tax on electronic money transactions this year to try to revive the economy.

With Ghana now buckling under nearly 30 percent inflation, the Accra shoe seller was shocked when the government announced in July it would have to seek help from the IMF.

President Nana Akufo-Addo once promised “Ghana Beyond Aid” to keep his West African country off foreign aid dependency.

But a sudden U-turn over an IMF credit has sparked fierce debate over his economic management as Ghana struggles with the highest costs of living in two decades.

“You can’t impose taxes on us under the guise of saving the economy and then overnight come and tell us you’re going to the IMF,” trader Biney told AFP.

“I think they ran out of ideas.” 

Hit by the global pandemic and fallout from the Russian war in Ukraine on fuel and food prices, Ghana is in talks with International Monetary Fund to help stabilise its public finances.

But the decision prompted fears IMF-imposed austerity measures will force the end to Akufo-Addo’s social programmes and hurt Ghanaians already struggling with soaring costs.

A new opposition-led protest movement and unions threatening strikes over hardships have added pressure on the government just as an IMF team begins initial talks.

Saddled with heavy debt, limited access to fresh funds and few revenue options, the government says the IMF offers short-term help.

Ghana’s Deputy Finance Minister Abena Osei-Asare said after the pandemic eroded economic gains, the IMF deal would help with balance of payments and open the door to new financing while protecting social programmes.

“People don’t have an understanding of the sort of engagement we’re going to have with the IMF that’s why they are a bit apprehensive,” she told AFP.

– Soaring inflation –

Ghana’s economic data is not rosy. Growth slowed this year while inflation broke two decade highs at 29.8 percent in June, driven by transport and food costs.

Ghana’s debt to GDP ratio — a measure of what it owes against what it produces — rose from 65 percent to 80 percent during the pandemic, the IMF says.

Moody’s credit agency in February downgraded its outlook on Ghana’s bonds, citing the government’s liquidity and debt challenges.

“Ghana’s fiscal and debt vulnerabilities are worsening fast amid an increasingly difficult external environment,” the IMF said after the team’s visit this month.

“An IMF-supported program aims to provide space for Ghana to implement policies.”

This deal will be the 18th time Ghana has gone to the IMF after completing a three-year accord in 2019 which saw $918 million in support.

Just in May, Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta said an IMF deal was not an option, with the government preferring “home-grown” solutions. 

One of those, Ghana’s new electronic transaction tax or E-levy, was meant to help raise $900 million in much-needed revenue along with spending cuts.

But the tax was widely criticised and as people curtailed electronic payments, the E-levy has also fallen far short of revenue estimates.

Gabby Otchere-Darko, a leading ruling party member, tweeted in June the tax had only generated 10 percent of estimated revenues. 

“Given the situation that we find ourselves… we have no option,” John Kwakye, the director of research at the Accra-based IEA think tank, said of the IMF deal. 

“Going to the IMF was to build on our credibility.”

– Electoral fallout? –

But even with elections still two years away, an IMF deal will likely have political fallout.

Teaching unions went on strike earlier this month until the government agreed to cost of living allowances. Other public sector workers are threatening action.

A “Fix the Country” movement, which holds regular if small protests, has been joined by another group “Arise Ghana”. Last month its rally over economic hardships led to clashes with the police.

“The solution to Ghana’s problems doesn’t lie in Washington,” Yaw Baah, Secretary General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) said. “This is a tragic mistake by the government.” 

Eurasia Group’s Africa head Amaka Anku told clients the IMF programme will make it harder for Akufo-Addo’s New Patriotic Party to argue they are better economic managers. 

That may weaken the position of likely NPP candidate for 2024 Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia though his probably opponent National Democratic Congress or NDC leader and ex-president John Mahama also faces challenges.

“Bottom-line, this makes for a very close election in 2024,” Anku said.

Already the opposition has hit out.

“President Akufo-Addo and Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia should take full responsibility for incompetently managing the economy,” said NDC lawmaker Haruna Iddrisu.  

“The government must come clean and tell us what the people of Ghana should expect instead of blaming Ukraine and Russia.”

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi sealed 15 agreements with Algeria’s president Monday, ahead of the expected conclusion of another deal to boost gas deliveries and reduce Italy’s reliance on Russian supplies.

Draghi was received by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, and the two went on to sign agreements and memorandums of understanding in areas ranging from energy to sustainable development, justice and micro-enterprises.

The energy agreement signed on Monday is “a testament to our determination to achieve even more in this domain,” Draghi said, ahead of the expected signing of an oil and gas supply deal between Algeria and a clutch of companies including Italian energy giant Eni.

“Tomorrow, an important agreement between (US energy firm) Occidental (Petroleum), Eni and (French oil company) Total providing significant volumes of natural gas” to Italy will be signed, Tebboune earlier told reporters at a joint news conference with Draghi.

This contract will allow “the development of a site situated in the Berkine perimeter, and which should generate more than a billion barrels” of hydrocarbons, a government source told AFP.

Tebboune said the deal was worth $4 billion.

The government source confirmed that Algeria will also increase gas exports to Italy by four billion cubic metres in the coming days, as part of a deal reported Friday.

Italy buys the majority of its natural gas from abroad, with some 45 percent of its imports historically coming from Russia.

But Rome has increasingly looked to Algeria, historically its second biggest supplier, to reduce that dependence after the war in Ukraine sparked sanctions against Moscow and sent energy prices soaring.

Algeria has therefore supplanted Russia to “become in recent months the biggest supplier of gas” to Italy, Draghi told reporters on Monday.

According to APS, Algeria was set to furnish Italy with a total of around 20 billion cubic metres of gas in 2022 as a whole, before the latest deal. 

Draghi previously visited Algeria in April, when he concluded a deal to progressively increase from 2022 Algerian deliveries to Italy through the Transmed pipeline by up to nine billion cubic metres per year in 2023-24. 

In May, Eni signed a memorandum of understanding with Algeria’s Sonatrach to boost gas exploration in the North African country.

The MoU “will allow Sonatrach and Eni to evaluate the gas potential and opportunities for accelerated development at specific fields already discovered by Sonatrach in Algeria”, Eni said at the time.

Algeria is Africa’s biggest gas exporter and supplies around 11 percent of the natural gas consumed in Europe. 

Devastating forest fires that broke out last week in forested areas of northern Morocco have been contained, authorities said Monday.

One of the last fires, which destroyed some 500 hectares (1,200 acres) — half of it forested — was tamed on Monday in Tetouan province, local authorities said. 

Firefighting teams had earlier brought blazes elsewhere under control, notably in Larache, the worst-affected province, where one person was killed.

Up to Sunday, fires had burned across 6,600 hectares, according to the national forests agency. 

Twenty villages, some in remote areas, had been evacuated. 

But with temperatures expected to reach between 41 and 46 degrees Celsius (around 105-114 degrees Fahrenheit) during the remainder of this week, according to the national meteorological office, there could be more to come. 

Said Chakri, an environmentalist quoted by national news agency MAP, said that “the reality of climate change” contributed to the devastation. 

A Turbo Thrush plane dispatched to douse the flames in Tetouan was forced to make an emergency landing on Sunday, without injury to the pilot.

A total of eight Turbo Thrush planes were deployed, alongside five Canadair planes, and some 2,000 personnel, including the civil defence, the gendarmerie and the army, were mobilised. 

Surveillance drones were also deployed for the first time, in order to spot fires. 

Morocco, experiencing severe drought, has been hit by heatwaves over the past month. 

On the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, fires have also raged in southern Europe, from Spain and Portugal to Greece and France, where temperature records were broken on Monday.

Last year, a total of 2,782 hectares of Moroccan forest were destroyed by 285 fires that broke out between January and September, notably in the mountainous Rif region. 

US aid chief Samantha Power on Monday promised $1.18 billion to help avert famine in the Horn of Africa and urged other nations including China to do more to fight a food crisis aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Power voiced alarm that the war as well as climate change were worsening hunger around the world, just after a decade of progress had been “obliterated” by the Covid pandemic.

“Today we are confronting something even more devastating as not only are tens of millions more people facing that grave hunger, many of them are at risk of outright starvation,” she said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Power, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, said the situation was especially dire in turbulent Somalia, conflict-hit Ethiopia and Kenya, the so-called Horn of Africa which is forecast to experience its fifth straight drought later this year.

Announcing a visit to the Horn of Africa this weekend, Power said that at least 1,103 children there are known to have died and some seven million other children are severely malnourished.

Power said the $1.18 billion in US aid would include emergency food — notably sorghum, a locally used grain more readily available than wheat — as well as a peanut-based supplement for malnourished children and veterinary services for dying livestock.

“Now we need others to do more, before a famine strikes, before millions more children find themselves on the knife’s edge,” she said.

Global prices of food have skyrocketed due to the war in Ukraine, a leading wheat exporter, with Russian warships blocking ports as Kyiv lays mines to avert a feared amphibious assault.

Power criticized the “sinister” policies of Russia but also pinned blame on China — seen by the United States as a leading global competitor — over its trade restrictions on fertilizer and “hoarding” of grain.

If China released fertilizer or grain to the global market or World Food Programme, it would “significantly relieve pressure on food and fertilizer prices and powerfully demonstrate the country’s desire to be a global leader and a friend to the world’s least developed economies,” she said.

She also issued a tacit criticism of India, which is seen by Washington as an emerging ally but has declined to shun historic partner Russia and has imposed its own export ban on wheat.

Praising Indonesia for lifting restrictions on palm oil, Power said, “We encourage other nations to make similar moves, especially since several of the countries instituting such bans have been unwilling to criticize the Russian government’s belligerence.”

“Countries that have sat out this war must not sit out this global food crisis,” she said.

Delegates from across Africa launched Monday in Rwanda the first continent-wide gathering about the role of protected areas in ensuring the future of our planet.

The IUCN Africa Protected Areas Congress (APAC) is being held just a few months before the COP15 summit in December when global leaders are aiming to adopt a much-delayed pact to shield nature from the damage wrought by human activity.

“Protected areas are critical for the survival of the planet,” International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) director general Bruno Oberle said on the opening day of the talks in the capital Kigali.

“And the more we manage them for the benefit of people and nature,the more we will build a future where everyone — human and animal — thrives,” he said on Twitter.

Organisers said APAC will aim to shape the role of protected and conserved areas in safeguarding Africa’s wildlife, delivering vital ecosystem services, and promoting sustainable development while conserving the continent’s cultural heritage and traditions. 

“It is high time that African policymakers put in place strong measures and strategies to ensure that the devastation of our rich biodiversity is stopped,” Rwandan Prime Minister Edouard Ngirente said.

Last month, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) 196 members held negotiations on the draft global biodiversity framework in Nairobi, but made only limited progress in ironing out differences.

At the heart of the COP15 draft treaty is a provision to designate 30 percent of Earth’s land area and oceans as protected zones by 2030.

More than 90 world leaders have signed a pledge over the past two years to reverse nature loss by then, saying the interconnected threats of biodiversity loss and climate change are a “planetary emergency”.

According to the most recent Protected Planet report by the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre, only 17 percent of land habitats and around seven percent of marine areas were protected by 2020.

One million species are threatened with extinction, according to UN experts, and global warming is on track to make large swathes of the planet unliveable.

UN biodiversity experts warned this month that rampant exploitation of nature is a threat to the well-being of billions of people across the world who rely on wild species for food, energy and income.

The Kigali gathering runs until July 23 and has attracted more than 2,000 participants from across Africa and beyond, according to organisers.

Kenya is a democracy with free and fair elections, Deputy President William Ruto said Monday in an interview with AFP, confident that he will emerge victorious in the  presidential poll on August 9.

Previous elections in the East African powerhouse have often seen accusations of vote-rigging but Ruto, known as a sharp strategist, insisted he would respect the outcome of the vote.

“I am very confident that I will win this election,” Ruto said in an interview at his Nairobi offices, where huge vehicles plastered with his face or the yellow and green colours of his party, the United Democratic Alliance, line the driveway.

“People of Kenya ultimately make their decisions. There is a wrong narrative that elections are manipulated…  It is very difficult to steal an election,” the 55-year-old former MP and minister said. 

At most, elections can be “influenced”, he conceded, but “we will stand (our ground) and still win against the so-called system”.

The ambitious politician was originally poised to succeed his boss, President Uhuru Kenyatta, as the ruling party’s candidate for the top job.

But a shock alliance between Kenyatta and his longtime rival Raila Odinga, who is now running against Ruto, has relegated the vice president to the sidelines.

Recent elections have frequently been followed by violent clashes and allegations of rigging. The 2017 poll saw Odinga approach the Supreme Court, which annulled the result and ordered a re-run — a first for Africa.

The disputed 2007 vote was marked by an eruption of politically-motivated ethnic violence, leaving more than 1,100 people dead.

Kenyatta and Ruto were indicted by the International Criminal Court for their role in the 2007-2008 killings before the cases collapsed.

Both the leading candidates have vowed to accept next month’s result, with Odinga telling a press conference on Monday, “If we lose the elections fairly, we will accept the outcome and congratulate the winner.”

For his part, Ruto said he would willingly cooperate with his rival if Odinga were to win.

“We will have… to make sure Kenya remains a democracy and Kenya moves forward,” he said.

– All about the economy –

After a decade spent at the heart of the Kenyatta government, Ruto now faces a difficult balancing act between claiming credit for the administration’s infrastructure investments and attacking his boss over the surging “crisis of cost of living”.

Accusing Kenyatta of abandoning their original agenda to improve food security and housing during his second term, Ruto has focused his campaign on promising to raise the purchasing power of ordinary Kenyans.

Three in ten Kenyans live in extreme poverty, on less than $1.90 a day, according to the World Bank.

A wealthy businessman with a rags-to-riches background, Ruto has positioned himself as a defender of “the hustlers” trying to eke out a living in a country dominated by “dynasties” — a reference to the Kenyatta and Odinga families.

Kenyatta’s father Jomo was the country’s first president while Odinga’s father Jaramogi served as vice-president. 

“The single most important issue today in this election is about the economy,” said Ruto.

He has backed a “bottom-up” economic model aimed at tackling inequality in a country long plagued by corruption and poor governance, before being battered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the fallout from war in Ukraine. 

Rising inflation and other economic pressures have even pushed tribal allegiances — a familiar cornerstone of Kenyan politics — to the background, he said.

“We have largely managed to pull away from the usual competition around ethnicities and those kind of things to a space where we are discussing issues that apply to all Kenyans: cost of living, the economy, creating jobs.”

Under the gaze of an enormous, old-fashioned manually-operated scoreboard, Zimbabwe came up with all the right numbers at the weekend as they qualified for the Twenty20 World Cup for the first time since 2016.

Craig Ervine’s team clinched their ticket to Australia in October when they beat Papua New Guinea in their semi-final last Friday in the country’s second largest and southern city of Bulawayo.

They then iced the cake with a 37-run win over the Netherlands, who also qualified, in the final at the city’s Queens Sports Club, a throwback to another age when cricket did not rely so heavily on the bells and whistles of modern technology. 

Established in 1890 when Zimbabwe was still the British colony of Rhodesia, the ground was inevitably named after Queen Victoria. It became a regular venue for many touring sides and hosted its first Test match in 1994.

In spite of the coloured clothes and frenetic pace of a T20 match, there is still an old-world charm about Queens.

The stately pavilion stands proud and the ground is ringed by trees that create a panoramic umbrella for spectators sitting on the grass out of the sun, making it one of the most picturesque venues in the world.

But one key feature stands out: the scoreboard which reaches back into the 20th century, perhaps even earlier, for its display and methods of delivering information to the public.  

A team of shadowy figures ghost their way around inside the great box, all black and yellow, manually changing names and numbers. 

Adding up scores on the aged scoreboard, energetic young men, including aspiring cricketers and passionate fans, operate seamlessly in coordination with scorers waving papers from behind a glass screen in the media box some 200 metres away on the other side of the ground. 

Hand gesture communication is sometimes overridden by radio communication to verify and clarify figures.

– Errors, misspelt names –

Most international scoreboards around the world are now fully digital but the old-school scoreboard at Queen’s adds to the atmosphere, occasionally churning out unintended humour for fans, with reverse or misspelt names and upside-down numbers, just some of the errors associated with manual operations at fast turnaround.

More than a dozen youngsters physically swap in scores, led by a seasoned calligraphic artist who hand-paints player names as the game progresses. 

“It has become much better now with the radios, we can quickly rectify errors,” said scorer Donald Nyoni. 

“It is key to keep up with scores accurately. The unfortunate part is that the old board has no provision for new rules on umpiring decisions.”

This old scoring system calls for ‘sober habits’ but provides employment to youths who risk being lost in a country plagued by an upsurge in drug abuse and high unemployment.

They each earn US$10 per day for operating the scoreboard but they need to be fully focussed on the action in the middle and in the scorers’ box opposite. 

Even checking phones can be distracting and “cause a mess of the statistics,” said Admire Mupembe, in his early 20s, while shuffling through a wad of number plates to slot in. 

Queens is not alone in its manual board as India still has several as does the recently built 35,000-seater Pallekele ground in Sri Lanka. 

They all lend charm to proceedings and unlike digital boards, which flash away for advertisements, they offer a view of the score at all times. What the spectator misses out on, however, is the absence of replays, from different angles, and even features, including information on umpiring decisions. 

The spectators at Queens are not overly concerned, however, as the Zimbabwe team marches through to the T20 World Cup, a welcome boost for a cricket nation that has been starved of recent glories. 

After becoming a Test nation in 1993, Zimbabwe enjoyed its share of successes as players such as Andy Flower, Heath Streak and Henry Olonga became household names. 

In recent years, alas, the game has wilted but it remains the only sport with a significant fan-base cutting across the polarised political and racial boundaries, making qualification for the T20 World Cup all the more important. 

Australia, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, Namibia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the United Arab Emirates and the West Indies had already secured places.

The 16-team tournament runs from October 16 to November 13 with Australia defending a title they won in the UAE last year. 

Thousands of Sudan’s Hausa people set up barricades and attacked government buildings in several cities Monday, witnesses said, after a week of deadly tribal clashes in the country’s south.

In a bid to shed light on the violence in Blue Nile state, which has killed 60 people and wounded 163 others according to local authorities, Hausa activists called for a demonstration Tuesday in Sudan’s capital Khartoum.

The clashes, between the Berti and Hausa tribes, first erupted last Monday after the Bertis rejected a Hausa request to create a “civil authority to supervise access to land”, a prominent Hausa member told AFP on condition of anonymity.

But a senior member of the Bertis had said the tribe was responding to a “violation” of its lands by the Hausas.

Blue Nile governor Ahmed al-Omda on Friday banned public gatherings and marches for one month and imposed a night-time curfew in the state, which borders Ethiopia.

In a statement Monday, he said authorities will “strike with an iron fist” against those inciting “racism, hatred and strife,” according to state news agency SUNA.

Troops were deployed in Blue Nile on Saturday, and since then an uneasy calm has prevailed there although tensions have escalated elsewhere.

In the eastern city of Kassala, the government banned public gatherings after several thousand Hausa people “set government buildings and shops on fire”, according to eyewitness Hussein Saleh.

“It’s panic in the city centre,” Kassala resident Idriss Hussein told AFP by telephone. He said protesters were “blocking roads and waving sticks.”

In the city of Wad Madani, some 200 kilometres (around 125 miles) south of Khartoum, “hundreds of Hausa people put up stone barricades and burned tires on the main bridge to block traffic”, resident Adel Ahmed told AFP.

Experts say a military coup led by army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in October 2021 has created a security vacuum that has fostered a resurgence in tribal violence, in a country where deadly clashes regularly erupt over land, livestock, access to water and grazing.

Pro-democracy activists have accused Sudan’s military and ex-rebel leaders who signed a 2020 peace deal of exacerbating ethnic tensions in Blue Nile for personal gain.

The Hausas are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, with tens of millions of members living in several countries.

There are three million Hausas in Sudan, where they largely follow the majority religion of Islam, but speak their own native language rather than Arabic.

They mostly live off agriculture in Darfur, Al-Jazira state and in the eastern states of Kassala, Gedaref, Sennar and Blue Nile.