By LISA VIVES, Global Information Network Member, National Writers Union
Oct. 23, 2023 (GIN) – Back in 1963, the founders of the Organization of African Unity pledged to work and speak as one, forge an international consensus in support of the liberation struggle and fight against apartheid.
Their aims were high. The achievements less so. Last week, a one-day Cairo Summit for Peace, attended by leaders and top officials from more than a dozen countries, closed without agreement on a joint statement two weeks into a conflict that has killed thousands and visited a humanitarian catastrophe on the blockaded Gaza enclave of 2.3 million people.
Only one Africa leader, President Cyril Ramaphosa, was in attendance.
The speeches reflected growing anger in the region, even among those with close ties to Israel as the war sparked by a massive Hamas attack enters a third week with casualties mounting and no end in sight.
The current Israel-Hamas conflict in the Gaza strip has left the African continent deeply divided, with some countries choosing to remain silent while others openly showing solidarity with either Israel or Palestine.
Kenya, Ghana, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo all expressed some form of support for Israel since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.
“Kenya joins the rest of the world in solidarity with the State of Israel and unequivocally condemns terrorism and attacks on innocent civilians,” said President William Ruto, writing on Twitter, now known as X.
Ghana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs proclaimed Israel’s right to exist and defend itself while cautioning that country to exercise restraint and seek negotiation talks for both parties.
Rwanda called the Hamas attack an ‘act of terror’ while the Democratic Republic of the Congo expressed support for Israel from the presidency’s Twitter account.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, in contrast, expressed solidarity with the people of Palestine.
“All of us standing here pledge our solidarity for the people of Palestine,” he said at a recent meeting of the African National Congress in Johannesburg. “We stand here because we are deeply concerned about the atrocities that are unfolding in the Middle East.”
One of Palestine’s strongest African supporters is Algeria which condemned ‘brutal air strikes by the Zionist (Israel) occupation forces in the Gaza Strip’. They stated they were in ‘full solidarity with the Palestinian people’ while calling on the international community to act against ‘repeated criminal attacks.’
Tunisia, a member of the Arab League like Algeria, expressed ‘complete and unconditional support for the Palestinian people “who have been ‘under Zionist occupation for decades.” They called on the world ‘to stand by the Palestinians and remember the massacres carried out by the Zionist enemy.”
Countries that are more neutral include Nigeria which, on the day of the attack, condemned the “cycle of violence and retaliation that the current escalation has assumed.”
While Uganda has not taken an official side, President Yoweri Museveni urged Israel and Palestine to strive for peace and a ‘two-state solution’.
“African countries take different positions based on their political and geopolitical interests,” said Louis Gitinywa, a Rwanda-based political analyst and constitutional lawyer. “This is nothing new. States have interests, they don’t have friends.”
The only African country with a strong historical attachment to Israel is Ethiopia, but it is yet to make clear its stance on the current situation.
Buchanan Ismael, a political scientist at the University of Rwanda, pointed out that some African countries depend on Israel for military technology and weapons.
“I don’t think African states have very strong diplomatic relations with Israel,” he said. “Their ties are based on an “opportunistic way of cooperation and assistance.” w/pix of pro-Palestinian demonstration in South Africa
GRIEF IN ZIMBABWE OVER YOUNG MINERS TRAPPED UNDERGROUND
Oct. 23, 2023 (GIN) – Dozens of mothers have been sleeping on the floor for the past week, just outside Bay Horse Mine, hoping for any signs of life of their husbands and sons.
The men had been working in an inactive gold mine in Chegutu, about 70 miles west of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, when the disaster occurred. After retrieving 22 miners alive and nine bodies, the government called off the search for the rest of the trapped men.
While up to 30 people were still underground, according to Daniel Garwe, acting minister of local government , “the ground is moving which is threatening the lives of rescue teams. Operations have been stopped for now until a suitable area to enter the ground is established.”
The announcement angered grieving relatives of those still missing.
“It’s hard to leave knowing those rocks are pressing down on my children,” Jane Mucheni, a farmer, told Al Jazeera. “We have tried everything, every morning we have prayed [to God] and last week we even had a traditional ceremony to call on our ancestors to help us. Those who have been here with their big cars parked haven’t done anything, doesn’t anyone care?”
A dozen artisanal miners had joined the search for their colleagues trapped 800 feet underground. They carried only rudimentary picks and shovels to dig through the ground. Despite the intense heat and the suffocating smell of human remains, they pressed on until the government suspended the mission.
For years, unemployed young men in Zimbabwe’s gold-rich areas earned a living by working in unregulated mines with little to no safety procedures. Bay Horse, an inactive mine, had collapsed because the safety pillars had been dug out by other miners hoping to strike gold ore there, some miners said.
The accident has been declared a national disaster by the government, although mine failures like this are common in Zimbabwe’s extractive sector.
Farai Maguwu, director of the Harare-based Centre for Natural Resource Governance, called the gold industry “a crime scene”, riddled with corruption. Artisanal miners, locally called makorokoza, often operate in unsafe conditions.
In the first quarter of 2023, Zimbabwe recorded $376.73m in export earnings from 6.19 tonnes in gold deliveries, according to Fidelity Gold Refinery, a state agency that is the sole authorized buyer. More than half of those earnings are attributed to small-scale miners.
Illegal exports count for more than three times that amount tallied and smuggling involving high-ranking state officials was exposed by Gold Mafia, a four-part series by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, earlier this year.
“When a disaster such as this occurs, it’s the small-scale miners who take the risk to go down, they don’t have the right rescue equipment and they just burrow in the ground while the politicians don’t seem interested because these are the lives of poor miners, politicians seem to only worry about the gold,” Maguwu told Al Jazeera.
The search team also retrieved six corpses and several decomposing body parts of people yet to be identified.
NO WINNER IN LIBERIAN POLLS AFTER FRONT-RUNNERS FAIL TO REACH 50% PLUS ONE
Oct. 23, 2023 (GIN) – With 99.97 percent of the total votes counted, neither of the two leading candidates had received the required 50 percent plus one vote to avoid a runoff.
The election, held on Oct. 10, was the closest in two decades and was the first such contest to be organized without financial support or assistance from international partners.
Incumbent and former soccer superstar George Weah secured 43.84 percent of the vote, with more than 98 percent of the ballots counted, while Joseph Boakai, a veteran of Liberian politics and Weah’s main opponent, was trailing slightly with 43.44 percent of the vote.
Supporters of Mr. Weah’s party, the Coalition for Democratic Change, disturbed the vote-tallying process in at least two areas over the weekend, according to a coalition of civil society groups overseeing the election. Nine election workers have also been arrested, including in the capital, Monrovia, on suspicions of altering results on tally sheets, according to the Liberian police.
Mr. Weah, first elected in 2018, has been accused of doing too little to fight corruption since taking office. The unexplained deaths of four tax officials in 2020 and the seizure of weapons and illegal drugs — including cocaine worth $100 million last year — have led to fears that the country has an underlying security problem and has become both a transit point for narcotics and the hotbed of a youth drug problem, according to Dounard Bondo in the Semafor news outlet.
Mr. Boakai, who served as vice president under Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, campaigned on a promise to rescue Liberia from what he called Weah’s failed leadership, dubbing himself and his running mate “Rescue 1” and “Rescue 2.” He will be running with Senator Jeremiah Koung of the Movement for Democracy and Reconstruction, infamous for its leader Prince Yormie Johnson, a former warlord.
Johnson, a rebel leader during Liberia’s first civil war, is linked to the death by torture of former president Samuel Doe in 1990. Boakai’s main weakness however, according to some observers, is his age (78) and rumored health problems.
Weah’s mean weakness are soaring food prices and shortages of basic goods. Income disparities are so wide that, in a sense, there are only two classes—very rich and very poor, with a gaping hole in the middle. A recent report by the African Development Bank Group estimated that only 4.8 percent of Liberia’s population can be considered middle class—the lowest percentage on the continent, among the countries for which such data is available. Only 15 percent of the workforce is formally employed, and 79 percent of those who are employed nevertheless do not enjoy a steady income, according to a recent Ministry of Labor survey.
____
GLOBAL INFORMATION NETWORK creates and distributes news and feature articles on current affairs in Africa to media outlets, scholars, students and activists in the U.S. and Canada. Our goal is to introduce important new voices on topics relevant to Americans, to increase the perspectives available to readers in North America and to bring into their view information about global issues that are overlooked or under-reported by mainstream media.
