Africa

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Mon Jan 23, 2017 3:48 pm

The Gambia: Ex-ruler Yahya Jammeh 'plundered coffers'
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/01/g ... 01430.html

behappyalways wrote:Ex-President Yahya Jammeh leaves The Gambia after losing election
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38706426


behappyalways wrote:Gambia's President Jammeh refuses to leave office as deadline passes
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38672840
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Mon Feb 06, 2017 4:16 pm

悍匪闖酒店大堂 
中國客南非遇劫射爆頭
http://hk.apple.nextmedia.com/internati ... 6/19919465
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Tue Feb 21, 2017 4:47 pm

Mugabe turns 93, vows to rule on despite health fears
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/02/m ... 24021.html
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Tue Jun 06, 2017 9:05 pm

Is Congo's Kabila Buying Time?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 50813.html


'I'm Not Going to Commit Suicide'
http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 50521.html


South Africa falls into second recession in a decade
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40173590
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Sat Jun 17, 2017 6:02 pm

Will Robert Mugabe, 93, live to see his last election?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06 ... -election/
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Sun Aug 13, 2017 4:04 pm

Long walk to cronyism

Why keeping Jacob Zuma as president is bad for South Africa

Faced with a choice between right and wrong, the ANC chose wrong

THE most striking thing about the vote over whether to sack Jacob Zuma was the claims his supporters did not make. During the debate, in South Africa’s parliament on August 8th, no one said: “Let’s keep Mr Zuma as our president because he has done such a splendid job of running the country.”

Some MPs from the ruling African National Congress (ANC) did not mention him by name at all, so embarrassing has his record become. Instead, they accused the opposition of all manner of skulduggery and, of course, racism. The defence minister likened the motion of no confidence in Mr Zuma to a coup.

The arts minister called the opposition parties that supported the motion “Mickey Mouse organisations”. Shortly after Mr Zuma narrowly survived the vote, his police minister described those who failed to back his boss as “suicide-bombers”.

Mmusi Maimane, leader of the Democratic Alliance, the largest (and most liberal) opposition group, spoke with more conviction. He called Mr Zuma a “corrupt and broken president” and quoted ANC grandees, including two former presidents of South Africa, who had called either explicitly or implicitly for parliament to throw him out.

He even suggested that Nelson Mandela, were he still alive, would have voted to ditch the president. Julius Malema, the leader of the other big opposition party, the far-left Economic Freedom Fighters, was even more forthright in his contempt for Mr Zuma.

Yet when the votes were tallied, the great survivor clung to power: the opposition fell 24 votes short of the 201 needed to remove him. His supporters celebrated by dancing and singing songs from the struggle against apartheid, South Africa’s old racist regime, which ended in 1994.

There have been several previous attempts in parliament to oust Mr Zuma, but this was the most significant yet because it was the first in which MPs were allowed to vote in secret.

The Constitutional Court had argued, in effect, that this was the only way ANC MPs could oppose the president without fear of reprisals. But in the end, party loyalty and Mr Zuma’s considerable powers of patronage kept him in the job.

Nonetheless, the vote was a stark warning for the ANC. Mr Zuma mustered only 198 MPs in his defence, a woeful result for the head of a party with 249 out of 400 seats in parliament. After accounting for absentees, it seems that a fifth of ANC MPs either abstained or voted against their president.

It is not hard to see why. Mr Zuma faces 783 charges of corruption, which he denies; his next court hearing is next month. A report from the public protector, an ombudsman, has accused Mr Zuma and the Guptas, a family of Indian businesspeople, of orchestrating “state capture”.

And the president’s son, Duduzane, may be called to answer questions before a parliamentary committee that is investigating allegations of graft at state-owned companies involving some of Mr Zuma’s key allies.

Before the vote Mr Zuma’s former minister of tourism, Derek Hanekom, spoke for many disgruntled ANC members, not to mention the country as a whole, when he complained of “massive looting and corruption”.

Such is the cronyism and mismanagement of the Zuma administration that South Africa has dipped into recession, its debt has been downgraded to junk and unemployment is a whopping 28% (or 36% if one includes those who have given up looking for work).

The economy contracted at an annualised rate of 0.7% in the first quarter, even as the population swells by 1.6% a year. Meanwhile, Mr Zuma’s cronies have grown staggeringly and ostentatiously rich.

Although they lost, the opposition parties hope that the vote will bind the ANC ever more closely in the eyes of voters to an unpopular president. This, they predict, will give them a better chance in national elections in 2019, especially if Mr Zuma manages to anoint his ex-wife, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, as the next leader of the ANC (and thus in all likelihood its presidential candidate).

That decision will be made at an ANC conference in December. Mr Zuma is thought to favour his former spouse in the hope that she will shield him from prosecution. The Democratic Alliance, which did well in local elections last year, thinks she would be easier to beat than someone with a different surname.

If the opposition feels any private glee that the ANC is destroying itself, it is surely tempered by sadness. Few can be happy that Africa’s oldest liberation movement and a once-proud torchbearer of democracy has fallen so low. Even fewer relish the prospect of South Africa enduring another two years under Mr Zuma.

The president has ignored court orders, fired his most competent ministers, mismanaged public funds and somehow got away with it. As for the people who believed the ANC’s promise of “a better life for all”, they will have to wait.

Source: The Economist
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Sun Aug 27, 2017 2:50 pm

Amazing disgrace

Zimbabwe’s first lady is accused of assault, again

Grace Mugabe is no stranger to controversy


GRACE MUGABE, the first lady of Zimbabwe and an accomplished shopper, is no stranger to controversy, at home or abroad. The most recent revolves around allegations that she flogged a young woman, Gabriella Engels, whom she found when she stormed into her sons’ swanky apartment in Johannesburg.

Photos released on social media after the incident showed Ms Engels with gashes on her head that required 14 stitches.

Charges were laid and the South African police asked Mrs Mugabe to come into a station to make a statement. But within days she had been whisked out of the country after being granted diplomatic immunity.

Having to skip a country on a diplomatic passport once might be regarded as a misfortune. But to do so twice begins to look like careless disregard for the law.

In 2009 Mrs Mugabe left Hong Kong under diplomatic immunity after she was accused of punching a news photographer who had dared to snap her in a high-end shopping district.

Back home, Mrs Mugabe also seems to have little regard for the law. Farmers have accused her of stealing their land. A Dubai-based businessman claimed she ordered police to seize his home in Harare in a row over a $1.3m diamond ring.

In May Human Rights Watch, a group based in New York, said that policemen acting on her behalf had forcibly removed 200 families from a citrus farm and had destroyed their homes. In Zimbabwe’s subverted legal system, there is no chance of her facing justice.

The incident reflects badly on South Africa, too. Mrs Mugabe was in the country for medical treatment rather than as part of an official delegation, and thus was not entitled to immunity. Yet this is not the first time that the government of Jacob Zuma has let foreign pals go free.

Two years ago South Africa broke its own and international law when it failed to arrest Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on genocide charges.

The government argued that diplomatic conventions allowing heads of state to attend conferences trumped its responsibility to the ICC; South Africa’s courts subsequently disagreed.

Civil-society groups plan to challenge in court the granting of immunity to Mrs Mugabe. At stake, they say, is not just the fate of a woman who has acted with impunity, but the rule of law itself.

Source: The Economist
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Photos 07 (Apr 14 - Dec 17)

Postby behappyalways » Tue Sep 26, 2017 11:49 am

Living with violence in the DR Congo
http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-41346859
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Sat Nov 04, 2017 9:03 pm

Surviving under Mugabe

Zimbabwe’s deepening crisis

A ruined country is waiting for its elderly dictator to go


A MONEY-CHANGER deftly flicks through a brick of bills, her fingernails a sparkly purple that matches her eye-shadow. She keeps the stack of “bond notes” (Zimbabwe’s ersatz money) bundled inside a sock in a plastic carrier bag. Real American dollars are hidden in her bra.

Although bond notes are officially worth the same as American dollars, here on a pavement in Harare, the capital, greenbacks trade at a premium of 20-30% to the bills printed by Mr Mugabe’s government.

Those wanting to buy dollar bills with mobile money, which is also supposedly denominated in the American currency, must pay a further premium of 30%.

Such a range of values for Zimbabwe’s money ought not to be possible since, officially at least, it does not have a currency. The country adopted the American dollar almost a decade ago after the central bank’s profligate printing of Zimbabwe dollars led to hyperinflation that peaked at 500,000,000,000%. At the time, notes with a face value of 100trn Zimbabwe dollars could barely pay for a loaf of bread.

Yet last year, when the government found it could no longer pay its bills using real dollars, it started issuing bond notes, claiming they were interchangeable. So insistent is it in this assertion that it has outlawed the street trading of ersatz dollars for the real thing: money-changers can face a decade behind bars if convicted.

But this money-changer says that some of her best customers are government officials who hoover up greenbacks to spend or stash abroad. The value of real dollars spikes whenever Robert Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since its independence in 1980, goes abroad with his bloated entourage.

“As long as there are bond notes, they will never stop us hustlers,” says the money-changer. “They need us. We are the people who are running the economy.”

After nearly two decades of lurching from one economic crisis to the next, life in Zimbabwe somehow still grinds on. Mr Mugabe, old and frail, presides over a fragile economy yet still controls his party, Zanu-PF. At 93, he is running yet again for president, with an election planned for the first half of next year. T

hough physically weak and forgetful (in 2015 he read the same speech in parliament twice) he still plays factions of the party off against each other to stay in control.

At a party conference in December he is expected to strengthen a faction aligned with his wife, Grace, at the expense of Emmerson Mnangagwa, who previously ran the security services and had been Mr Mugabe’s presumed successor. Mr Mnangagwa, one of two vice-presidents, lost his post as justice minister in a recent cabinet shuffle.

“When you become a threat to the centre of power, he disposes of you,” says Temba Mliswa, an independent member of parliament and former Zanu-PF provincial chairman who is considered close to Mr Mnangagwa. Mr Mugabe “is very old but he still understands power”.

Most Zimbabweans think nothing will change until Mr Mugabe dies. In the meantime they must scramble and adapt to survive. As many as 95% of working people hustle for a living in the informal sector.

On the streets one finds professionals and graduates working as unlicensed traders. Sten Zvorwadza, who leads a street-vendors’ union, reckons there are 100,000 such traders in Harare.

Some sell goods in the tiniest of quantities—a squeeze of toothpaste, a teaspoon of sugar—because that is all many buyers can afford. Mr Mugabe thinks hawkers make the city look dirty, and wants them moved to a dusty patch in a depressed industrial area of Harare where there would be fewer customers.

Riot police known as “black boots” have used water cannons to try to remove the hawkers. But they are fighting back. “Not a vendor by choice,” says a sign posted in central Harare. “If not this, what?” says another.

Everywhere you feel a sense of impending economic collapse. Many in the country fret that hyperinflation will return, fuelled by the government’s printing of electronic dollars. Since it cannot get real ones, and is running large fiscal deficits (about 8% of GDP last year and probably more this year) it has been issuing dollar-denominated treasury bills, or IOUs, to banks.

The banks in turn credit it with electronic dollars, which it uses to pay civil servants, whose wages consume about 90% of government revenues. But that money cannot be withdrawn.

The queues that once snaked around the block outside banks have disappeared, but only because there is hardly any cash to be had. Nearly everyone pays with swipe cards linked to Zimbabwean bank accounts, or EcoCash, a popular form of mobile money.

But the lack of foreign exchange means that imports may become scarce. In late September a shiver of panic over shortages of food and fuel rippled through the capital, sparking a round of panic-buying. And prices are rising.

John Robertson, an economist, reckons that the money supply expanded by 36% in the 12 months to August, six times more than the rate a few years earlier. “What’s behind that money? Nothing,” says Rob Davies, another economist in Harare. “It’s a Ponzi scheme.”

In October Mr Mugabe replaced his pragmatic finance minister, Patrick Chinamasa, with a loyalist. Mr Chinamasa lost his job while attending the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund where he was pleading for debt relief and new loans to restart the economy. Zimbabwe is unlikely to get either as long as Mr Mugabe is in charge.

Source: The Economist
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

Re: Africa

Postby behappyalways » Sun Nov 19, 2017 8:57 pm

Robert Mugabe sacked as leader of ZANU-PF
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/r ... 25934.html
血要热 头脑要冷 骨头要硬
behappyalways
Millionaire Boss
 
Posts: 39914
Joined: Wed Oct 15, 2008 4:43 pm

PreviousNext

Return to ASIA, OCEANIA & AFRICA: Data, News & Commentaries

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 17 guests

cron