Once approved by the army that took over power after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year by an uprising, the budget will be sent to the country’s newly elected parliament, where it is likely to face heated debate.

The Parliament, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, last month overwhelmingly rejected a cabinet plan to cut state spending.

Finance Minister Mumtaz al-Saeed said in a press conference that spending for the coming fiscal year that starts on July 1 would be 533.7 billion Egyptian pounds. A former draft for the budget published on May 9 put next year’s spending at 516 billion pounds.

Under the new budget, the deficit would be 135 billion pounds. In March, Saeed put the deficit for the current year at 144 billion pounds.

Last Monday the government announced it expects 4 to 4.5 percent growth in the economy for the coming year.

Social justice and unfair distribution of wealth were the main reasons behind last year’s uprising against Mubarak.

The government of army-appointed Prime Minister Kamal al-Ganzouri is expected to resign by early July after the election of a new president. A presidential vote starts on May 23-24.

Many economists believe the political and economic turmoil since last year’s uprising, which has eaten into revenue and increased demands for higher wages, could end up pushing the actual deficit much higher.

Egypt has asked to borrow $3.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund to help it plug next year’s deficit, but the IMF is insisting the government put together a programme that reins in spending or comes up with new sources of revenue.

A survey of 11 economists in March forecast, year-on-year gross domestic product (GDP) will grow by 1.6 percent in the financial year starting on July 1, 2012, but will rise to 4.0 percent the following year.

Reuters.

Zambia played with only home-based players, only one of whom featured in the dramatic post-match penalty shootout win over the Ivory Coast in February’s final in Libreville, Gabon.

Winger Felix Katongo was made captain for the hastily-arranged match in Luanda, which served as a warm-up for both countries ahead of their World Cup qualifiers starting next month.

Zambia must play Ghana and Sudan, the teams they beat in the semifinal and quarter-final of the Nations Cup respectively, in their World Cup qualifying group.

Angola’s first opponents are Uganda and Liberia.

Reuters.

NAIROBI – In Kenya, there is a running gag that sums up how far away the Turkana people live from the rest of us. When a Turkana man leaves for the capital, Nairobi, the joke goes, he tells his family, “I’m going to Kenya.”

In recent weeks, ever since Kenya’s government announced that oil had been discovered in the Lake Turkana basin, more jokes have emerged. A picture of unidentified happy, half-naked black children I had seen on my Facebook friends’ profiles many months ago began circulating again, this time with the caption, “Discover Oil in Turkana…No More Dry Skin.”

At first, I chuckled at the jokes. As a Maasai, I have heard every Kenyan joke about how “uncivilized” my people are, so I was happy that someone else was in the spotlight for a change. But when I saw a photo of a topless Turkana woman doctored to look as if she were breastfeeding a white baby, my attitude began to change.

The creator of the picture was implying that now that oil has been found in northwestern Kenya, Western oil workers will descend on the region and impregnate Turkana women, perhaps against their will. A British company discovered the oil, and, thanks to allegations that British soldiers raped hundreds of Kenyan women from 1965 to 2002, our former colonial master’s reputation isn’t good. But if the rights of the Turkana end up being violated, it will be Kenyans, not the British, who will bear the blame.

The Turkana people are, as the joke suggests, as far away from Nairobi as one can be without being foreigners. For this reason, we know very little about them. In schools, we learned about them only within the context of the Leakey family’s decades-long work excavating the Lake Turkana basin in search of fossils of humans’ ancestors. This could be one reason why Kenyans have historically looked at the Turkana people as archaic beings, millennia away from “civilization” and with different needs from most of the country.

The lack of adequate infrastructure in the Turkana region is evidence of this. Unlike the Maasai, the Turkana inhabit a region that, until now, was of little or no value to the country. There are no wild animals to attract tourists, and, although the Turkana, like the Maasai, have preserved their indigenous culture, they are not renowned around the world, perhaps because of their distance from Nairobi.

Indeed, Turkana is one of Kenya’s most neglected districts. Whenever there is a famine, chances are high that Turkana will be affected. Gado, a renowned cartoonist for one of Kenya’s leading newspapers, summed it up best, depicting a jubilant Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki leading a pack of bureaucrats and dogs in suits to Turkana to announce to the people, “Rejoice! We have discovered oil!” A Turkana woman asks him, “And when will you discover water?”

In addition to famine, the Turkana people have endured decades of raids by cattle rustlers from neighboring Ethiopia and Sudan (now South Sudan). Still, Kenya – which has been actively involved in peacekeeping operations in the Horn of Africa region and beyond – has not seen that as a good reason to protect Turkana.

The discovery of oil presents Kenya with a rare opportunity to end the Turkana community’s marginalization. Discussion of how the oil exploration and extraction will proceed needs to start now, and the health of the environment surrounding the Turkana people must be paramount.

“Pastoralists and indigenous people often rely heavily on their immediate environment for their livelihoods,” says Ikal Angelei, the director of Friends of Lake Turkana, which has been opposing the construction of Gibe III, an Ethiopian dam that threatens to reduce the amount of water flowing to the lake. Angelei says, “My fear is that if the oil exploration and drilling happens without community participation, and goes against the communities’ expectations, there is a great possibility of conflict.”

Africa’s numerous resource-driven conflicts validate Angelei’s concerns. Some of the precautions that she suggests to safeguard her people’s welfare include establishing a regulatory body that fosters transparency in contract negotiations; balancing oil production with conservation of the area’s unique biodiversity; enforcing high standards of corporate responsibility; and regulating land sales to prevent conflicts. Finally, the government should ensure that Turkana people are trained to understand and participate in the new sector.

If Kenya approaches oil exploration and extraction in Turkana the way my Facebook friends have, and fails to implement these common-sense recommendations, a few years from now Kenyans might be sorry that oil was ever found. Indeed, Kenya could end up with a conflict similar to the one in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, where local people took up arms to fight the oil industry’s degradation of their environment.

Unfortunately, the foundation for such a conflict has already, sadly, been laid. Many people in the Lake Turkana region are already armed with AK-47s and other weapons originally intended for protection from cattle rustlers. If Kenya’s government fails to protect the Turkana from the oil companies as well, its people might well start shooting.

* Juliet Torome, a writer and documentary filmmaker, was awarded Cinesource Magazine’s first annual Flaherty documentary award.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

Le second site choisi est le centre de formation de la police de Joalandi à vingt kilomètres de Bissau. D’autres lieux pourront être aménagés selon les autorités mais la plupart des casernes du pays sont dans un état de dégradation très avancé, d’où la nécessite de trouver des fonds pour les rendre habitables.

L’arrivée de cette force est sur toutes les langues, dans les lieux de travail, dans les quartiers et les coins de rues, souvent transformés en stations de lavage de voitures.

Pour ces jeunes chauffeurs de taxi, qui doutent de la capacité réelle des soldats nigériens, cette force ne résoudra pas le problème : « En termes de stabilité, je pense que cette force ne saura pas résoudre le problème. Ce sera pire ! La Missang [Mission militaire technique angolaise pour l'Assistance et la Réforme, NDLR] était ici, cela n’a rien changé. Au contraire, elle crée une crise, une polémique. Je crois que ce sera la même chose avec cette force d’attente ».

Une des missions de cette force est de garantir la protection des personnalités du gouvernement, des édifices publics, et faciliter le retrait des troupes angolaises présentes dans le pays depuis mars 2011.

RFI.

Une grenade a explosé dans un bar-restaurant fréquenté de Mombasa. Bien que l’attaque n’ait pas encore été revendiquée, les autorités kenyanes pointent du doigt le groupe islamiste al Shebab.
Depuis que le Kenya s’est engagé aux côtés de l’Ethiopie en Somalie, elle est sujette aux attentats.

Le Centre kényan de la jeunesse musulmane (MYC), une organisation décrite par l’ONU comme liée aux shebab s’est réjoui de l’attaque mercredi sur son compte Twitter, sans toutefois en revendiquer la responsabilité.

Mardi soir, trois hommes armés ont tenté d’entrer dans le restaurant mais en ont été empêchés par des gardes qui désiraient les fouiller. Un des hommes a alors ouvert le feu, blessant un garde, avant de s’enfuir avec ses complices qui ont jeté deux grenades, blessant trois autres personnes.

Depuis que le Kenya s’est engagé aux côtés de l’Ethiopie en Somalie, elle est sujette aux attentats. Les islamistes semblent avoir décidé de punir le Kenya par des actes de terrorisme.

The Somali-based pirates responded by threatening to kill crew being held on more than a dozen hijacked vessels if they were attacked again.

The EU Naval Force (EU Navfor) said it had carried out the overnight raid on pirate targets using helicopters and surveillance aircraft with the agreement of the beleagured, Western-backed Somali government.

It was the first time EU Navfor had taken its fight against the pirates to Somali soil since its mandate was expanded earlier this year to allow strikes on land as well as sea.

But at risk are over 300 hostages of various nationalities held by the pirates, who have so far generally refrained from killing crew as they seek multi-million dollar ransoms.

A Somali pirate who identified himself as Abdi told Reuters that a helicopter attacked the central Somali coastline near Hardhere, a known pirate haven.

“An unidentified helicopter destroyed five of our speedboats early in the morning. There were no casualties. We were setting off from the shore when the helicopter attacked us. We ran away without counter-attacking,” he said.

“If we are attacked while with hostages, we shall take any necessary step to save ourselves, we may also kill the hostages if we miss other options to survive,” Abdi told Reuters.

NO BOOTS ON THE GROUND

EU Navfor said it had carried out the attack to destroy pirate equipment, four days after Somali gunmen hijacked a Greek-owned oil tanker carrying close to a million barrels of crude oil in the Arabian Sea.

EU Navfor’s Operation Commander, Rear Admiral Duncan Potts, said the attack would “further increase the pressure on, and disrupt, pirates’ efforts to get out to sea to attack merchant shipping and dhows”.

Somalia’s government said it had backed the strike against the pirates, and encouraged further attacks. “(The government) and the EU had agreed upon inland attacks on pirates, avoiding civilian casualties. We were aware of the EU operation today,” government spokesman Abdirahman Osman told Reuters.

“We encourage frequent in land attacks – this is the only solution to piracy,” he said.

EU Navfor said no Somalis had been wounded as a result of the attack and no EU forces had landed on Somali territory, which has been lawless and torn by armed violence since warlords overthrew dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

“We have monitored several locations for quite a long time and the time and place chosen was one of the best opportunities,” said Timo Lange, a media officer for EU Navfor.

He said the force would launch similar attacks in future “given that those targets will show up again”.

In March the EU extended its counter-piracy operation off the coast of Somalia to the end of 2014 and expanded the area it covers to include the coastline itself.

“The concern is that pirates will simply relocate logistics bases further inland, possibly among coastal communities, to avoid EU airborne attacks,” Rory Lamrock, an intelligence analyst with security firm AKE, told Reuters.

“Hostages are still a ransomable commodity and intentional murders will remain unlikely, but an escalation in violence directed at hostages is definitely a possible response.”

PRECEDENT

Despite successful efforts to stop attacks in the Gulf of Aden shipping lane, international navies have struggled to contain piracy in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea due to their limited resources and the vast distances involved.

“(It) may take time to limit the overall scope of pirate activities. The pirates have had virtually unconstrained ability to operate for five or six years now and that won’t be rolled back rapidly,” said a maritime analyst who declined to be named.

The Somali pirates have raked in millions of dollars in ransoms in recent years in what has become a highly organised international criminal enterprise.

A study published earlier this year by the One Earth Future Foundation showed Somali piracy cost the world economy some $7 billion last year, with ransoms paid reaching $160 million.

Somali pirates are switching back to using smaller cargo and fishing vessels as “motherships”, hoping to evade detection in the face of more robust maritime security.

The International Transport Workers’ Federation, one of the biggest unions representing seafarers, welcomed the EU Navfor attack.

“Limited though the effects of any one single operation can be, it sets a precedent for future actions. It is particularly welcome in a week that has seen increased use of weapons and violence by pirates,” said union chairman David Heinde.

Reuters.

The loan, which replaced a planned Eurobond and is meant to substitute nearly half of a 119 billion shillings local borrowing target for the 2011/12 (July-June) fiscal year, would go towards ongoing infrastructure projects, officials said.

Treasury said in April it had postponed the Eurobond to the 2013/14 fiscal year, and analyst said the success of the syndicate loan was a good pointer at the ability of the biggest economy in east Africa to access the global financial markets.

Kenya is rated B+ by Standard & Poor’s and Fitch.

“Now we can start negotiating on the sovereign bond for the next fiscal year … because the intention was to retire the expensive domestic debt,” Finance Minister Robinson Githae said at the loan signing.

“The syndicate loan is competitively priced at an interest rate of 4.75 percent per annum over Libor, and is also competitively priced when compared with other similar African debt financing.”

Kenya decided to borrow internationally late last year after yields on government securities soared to highs of 20 percent in December from as low as 2 percent in January.

This made it costly to borrow domestically, especially to fund the government’s infrastructure development plans which are core to its economic growth aims.

Yields have since edged down in oversubscribed auctions this year as inflation dropped for five straight month to 13.1 percent in April.

“The market had evidently nosed out the imminence of the loan and this is evidenced in the sharp fall in government yields,” said Aly Khan Satchu, an independent analyst.

The arrangement of the loan was done by a consortium of foreign banks including Citibank London, Standard Chartered Bank and South Africa’s Standard Bank, who also fully underwrote the loan facility.

“We are particularly proud to have effectively delivered this financing solution for the sovereign during what has been a challenging period in the markets,” David McCaig, Global Head of Debt Products at Standard Bank, said.

Reuters.

Ils annoncent aussi qu’ils ne défileront pas à l’occasion de la fête du 20 mai et enfin qu’ils enverront une délégation auprès du président français élu, François Hollande, pour lui présenter leurs attentes en matière de coopération bilatérale.

C’est d’abord un message d’unité que l’opposition très affaiblie a voulu envoyer ce dimanche. En revanche, elle reste évasive sur ses moyens d’actions. A la question de savoir si elle participera aux législatives de février et sous quelle forme, l’opposition botte par exemple en touche. Elle explique que sa future ligne de conduite sera bientôt arrêtée par le tout nouveau secrétariat stratégique.

Rappelons qu’en octobre dernier, ces partis s’étaient déjà fendus d’une déclaration de Yaoundé pour rejeter cette fois les résultats d’une présidentielle, avant de finalement se résoudre, à demi-mot, à accepter la réélection de Paul Biya.

RFI.

Réunis de nouveau à Cotonou chez le président en exercice de l’Union africaine, le groupe des huit chefs d’Etat ou de gouvernement de l’Afrique représentant les communautés régionales du continent n’a pu trouver une solution à la crise qui déchire l’UA. Au terme du nouveau sommet du G8, aucun nom ou pays n’a été désigné par consensus pour prendre la tête de la commission de l’Union africaine. Selon le ministre béninois des affaires étrangères, Nassirou Bako Arifari, les présidents gabonais et sud-africain, à qui le comité ad’ hoc a recommandé de faire des consultations, ont présenté leur rapport.

Vers un vote ?

Le consensus est apparemment difficile à trouver autour du nom de la personne qui sera désignée pour diriger la Commission de l’Union africaine. A l’issue de la réunion du 14 mai 2012 à Cotonou, une troisième rencontre du G8 africain est convoquée. Elle se tiendra à la veille du Sommet de Lilongwe et vise à faire le point des consultations avant la grande rencontre de tous les chefs d’Etat et de gouvernement de l’union. Certains observateurs prédisent déjà un échec de la troisième réunion du comité ad’ hoc plus connu sous le nom du G8 africain. Le Gabon et l’Afrique du sud tiennent toujours à présenter chacun leur candidat pour le poste de président de la Commission de l’UA. Jean Ping est le candidat du Gabon et Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, la candidate de l’Afrique du Sud.

Source: afrik.com

African economies grew at an average of more than 5 percent during the past decade with many countries benefiting from surging commodity prices, as well as growth in services, construction and agriculture.

But the character of the growth has done little to reduce extreme poverty and hunger. More than 40 percent of African children under five are malnourished, which means they suffer irreversible mental and physical disabilities, the UNDP said.

“The situation is quite bleak,” said Sebastian Levine, a UNDP policy adviser for Africa. “This economic resurgence that we have seen has not really had the impact that we would expect.”

Africa is the second fastest growing region after Asia, yet 48 percent of people were found to be living in poverty in 2008, compared to just 14 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

Africa continues to be a net importer of food despite an abundance of fertile land and water.

In its first Africa Human Development Report, “Towards a Food Secure Future”, the UNDP called for more investment in agriculture to ensure sustained growth and poverty reduction.

“If you don’t address food security, you’ll not be able to sustain this (growth),” Pedro Conceicao, UNDP’s chief economist for Africa, told AlertNet.

“In the long run, you will need populations that are healthy, that are educated, and that are able to be productive.”

Ghana became the first Sub-Saharan African country to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger by 2015 partly by focusing on policies that encouraged smallholder cocoa farmers to boost output, the report said.

It also recommended policies that boost nutrition, such as school feeding programmes and fortification of food with vitamins and iodine, and increase people’s ability to withstand shocks such as drought.

The report said investment in agricultural productivity was important not only for reducing hunger but also in creating jobs for Africa’s rapidly growing population, which is predicted to double to 2 billion by 2050.

“The demographic dynamics in Africa present a huge opportunity for the continent. We have seen in many countries that this usually results in more rapid rates of economic growth,” said Conceicao.

Agriculture could provide jobs for many young people.

“If agriculture becomes much more effective and much more interesting in terms of utilising and drawing on the skills of youth in new technologies, it will attract a whole new generation of youth and it will create job opportunities,” Levine said.