All 47 men deny offence of same-sex displays of affection, which carries 10-year jail term
Forty-seven men went on trial in Nigeria on Wednesday for public displays of affection with members of the same sex, an offence that carries a 10-year jail term in the country.
The men were among 57 arrested in a police raid on a hotel in the impoverished Egbeda district of the commercial capital, Lagos, in 2018. They pleaded innocent at a hearing last month.
Continue reading...Southern Africa’s third largest economy is a textbook example of the increasing debt facing a fast-growing continent
Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, was having a power cut, so the only light in the restaurant was from Fumba Chama’s mobile phone. The rapper, better known as PilAto, had just finished uploading a new track to Twitter. The bitter-sweet lyrics (in Bemba) of Yama Chinese describe the concerns of many Zambians: “They put on smart suits and fly to China to sell our country. The roads belong to China. The hotels are for the Chinese. The chicken farms are Chinese. Even the brickworks are Chinese.”
Continue reading...Repentance, reparation and remedy for the terrible damage done to the people of Bayelsa state in Nigeria is long overdue
• John Sentamu is the archbishop of York
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “All human beings … should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It is now widely acknowledged that human rights cannot be enjoyed without a safe, clean and healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment is enshrined in more than 100 constitutions all over the world because human and environmental rights are intertwined.
However, despite the endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, oil companies exploiting irreplaceable resources in the Niger Delta are callously flouting fundamental human rights. That is the conclusion I have been forced to draw from my work as chair of the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission (BSOEC).
Continue reading...As a doctors’ and nurses’ strike paralyses Zimbabwe’s health system, one woman has delivered 100 babies in her flat
•Photographs by Cynthia R Matonhodze
Six expectant mothers groan through their labour pains in the lounge of a tiny two-roomed apartment in Mbare, Zimbabwe’s oldest township.
Sweating and visibly in pain, a heavily pregnant woman peeps through the window to catch a breath while others lie on the floor.
Continue reading...The devastating disease can’t be stopped unless more protection is provided for patients and health workers
Entering the city of Goma as night fell, I saw the red lava glowing atop nearby Mount Nyiragongo – an ominous reminder of the insecurity hovering over the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s volatile east.
But a manmade – not natural – terror is keeping health workers in DRC awake tonight.
Continue reading...Opposition says this week’s poll cannot be seen as free or fair with ruling elite still in power
Millions of Algerians are to vote for a new president in a controversial poll likely to be shunned by the country’s mass protest movement, paving the way for future instability.
The Hirak opposition movement, which emerged this year from weekly demonstrations against the former French colony’s political establishment, has said the poll cannot be considered free or fair while the ruling elite, including the military, stay in power.
Continue reading...Jordan, Turkey and UAE singled out for ‘routinely and blatantly’ supplying weapons
UN member states have systematically violated a Libyan arms embargo, according to a long-awaited UN report due to be published on Monday that will identify Jordan, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates as the main culprits.
The report is expected to say these three countries “routinely and sometimes blatantly supplied weapons with little effort to disguise the source”. It is also likely to link the UAE to a bombing of a detention centre that has been described as a war crime.
Continue reading...Rights groups condemn hanging of Mooketsi Kgosibodiba and call on president to bring country into line with the rest of Africa
The new president of Botswana is facing pressure to abolish the country’s death penalty after last week’s surprise execution of a 44-year-old man for murder.
Mooketsi Kgosibodiba, a bricklayer, had been on death row since 2017 after strangling his employer in a row over stolen cement. Last week the government made the unexpected announcement that he had been hanged in Gaborone central prison.
Continue reading...Officials say winner’s refusal to face public questioning is ‘highly problematic’
Abiy Ahmed, the prime minister of Ethiopia, has come under pressure to appear before the media in Oslo this week when he collects the Nobel peace prize on Tuesday.
Senior officials of the Norwegian Nobel Institute have said the 2019 winner’s refusal to attend any event where he could be asked questions publicly is “highly problematic”.
Continue reading...Victoria Falls, on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, has slowed down to a trickle after an unprecedented decline in water levels, officials have said. Data from the Zambezi River authority showed water flow at its lowest since 1995, and well under the long-term average.
The Zambian president, Edgar Lungu, said it was a stark reminder of what climate change is doing to the environment, yet some scientists are cautious about categorically blaming the climate crisis. Harald Kling, a hydrologist at engineering firm Pöyry and a Zambezi River expert, said climate science dealt in decades, not particular years, 'so it’s sometimes difficult to say: this is because of climate change because droughts have always occurred'
Continue reading...One of southern Africa’s biggest tourist attractions has seen an unprecedented decline this dry season, fuelling climate change fears
For decades Victoria Falls, where southern Africa’s Zambezi river cascades down 100 metres into a gash in the earth, have drawn millions of holidaymakers to Zimbabwe and Zambia for their stunning views.
But the worst drought in a century has slowed the waterfalls to a trickle, fuelling fears that climate change could kill one of the region’s biggest tourist attractions.
Continue reading...Agnes Taylor accused of offences that allegedly occurred during Liberian war
A judge in London has dismissed torture charges against the ex-wife of the former Liberian president Charles Taylor.
The university lecturer Agnes Taylor, 54, was charged in 2017 with a string of offences alleged to have taken place in 1990 during the west African country’s civil war.
Continue reading...Bayelsa state once offered rich pickings for farmers and fisherman. Then oil companies arrived and wrought an environmental catastrophe
• All photographs by Arteh Odjidja, whose work features in the exhibition Rise for Bayelsa, which runs in London until 20 December 2019
Almost every day, Udengs Eradiri is informed of another oil spill in Bayelsa state, in the Niger Delta. Most of the time, little or nothing is done to clean up the mess, says Eradiri, the state’s commissioner for the environment.
“You just need to take a tour to understand the magnitude of the environmental abuse,” he adds. “[Bayelsa] used to be green, you could go to farm or fish. We used to have very impressive harvests. You would spend just an hour in the water and you have a lot of fish.”
Continue reading...Organisers of competition students travelled to attend demand their return to Nigeria
The organisers of an international student sports competition have called for two Nigerian table tennis players to be returned to their own country after Croatian police wrongly deported them to a Bosnian refugee camp.
Abia Uchenna Alexandro and Eboh Kenneth Chinedu, students at the Federal University of Technology Owerri in Nigeria, arrived in Zagreb on 12 November, on their way to participate in the fifth World InterUniversities Championships, held this year in Pula, Croatia.
Continue reading...As the Disney movie earns $1bn at the global box office, the actor says ‘I feel like I’m going to be overlooked and underestimated for a long time’
Mena Massoud, the Egyptian-Canadian actor who played Aladdin in the recent Disney live-action remake, has said he hasn’t had a single audition since its release.
Massoud told the Daily Beast: “I’m kind of tired of staying quiet about it … I want people to know that it’s not always dandelions and roses when you’re doing something like Aladdin. ‘He must have made millions. He must be getting all these offers.’ It’s none of those things. I haven’t had a single audition since Aladdin came out.”
Continue reading...Exiled Somali Kamil Ahmed says her job at Gargaar FM is more important than ever as the threat of closure hangs over the camp
Sitting in a small shipping container, Kamil Ahmed, 20, prepares to begin her live radio show.
“I feel like the whole community is waiting for me,” the only female reporter at the station says, flicking through her notebook.
Continue reading...Having their skills recognised is one of the main obstacles to employment faced by refugees in developed countries
The armed rebels had first ransacked the hospital where Timothée* worked as a doctor. Then, they went door to door with machetes, hunting down those seen as the wealthiest – the most educated first. When the house next door was burned down with his neighbours still inside, Timothée fled.
Without a chance to grab his passport or phone, Timothée ran through the darkness of the bush of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, knowing he might never see his family or his fiancee again.
Continue reading...Nile basin countries fear for their future water supplies as the Grand Renaissance hydroelectric project reaches completion
A new round of high-level talks has started in Cairo between three Nile basin countries aimed at resolving disputes over Ethiopia’s controversial Grand Renaissance dam, which is set to become Africa’s biggest hydroelectric power plant.
Analysts fear that Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia could be drawn into conflict if the dispute is not resolved before the $5bn dam begins operating next year.
Continue reading...A prosaic script lets down Mati Diop’s visually arresting, ghostly first feature
Although set in suburban Dakar, this beguiling debut feature from Mati Diop is a film that walks between worlds. The story is woven in the hinterland amid wealth and poverty, love and expediency, this life and the supernatural. It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.
It took me a second viewing to engage with the tonal shifts of the story of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), promised in marriage to a wealthy man, but who loves Souleiman (Ibrahima Traore), a construction worker who disappears at sea in search of a better life. Diop has a keen eye for a poetic image: the film opens with a shot of bustling streets dwarfed by the monstrous, looming haunch of a half-built tower. Later, there’s an achingly pensive shot of the sleeping quarters of the men who have left, their beds still rumpled from warm bodies; bottles of Victory aftershave primed for a night out that will never come. But the lyricism of the photography by Claire Mathon is not matched by the screenplay, which Diop co-wrote with Olivier Demangel and which seems rather flat and declamatory next to the eerie magic of the film’s gauzy light.
Continue reading...A hot and humid Sunday night in Luanda. In a poor neighbourhood near the centre of the Angolan capital, bats wheel in the darkness and loud techno drowns out the traffic on the potholed road. A young crowd has packed into a cavernous and crumbling concrete church in search of comic, rather than spiritual, relief.
Many have come to see Artur Pop, a comedian from a tough nearby neighbourhood who draws his material from the lives of young people such as those who have paid 1,000 kwanza – £1.28 at black market exchange rates, or more than £1.55 at the official bank rate – for the evening’s entertainment.
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