Tanzania is losing ground in the fight against illicit drugs, recording more cases and suspects of drug offences compared to the number of seizures by relevant authorities last year.
Christopher Shekiondo Drugs Control and Monitoring Unit Commissioner, told the press in Dar es Salaam on Friday that there was an increase in drug related crimes.
Quoting a report, he said: “There were 8,452 suspects, of whom, 806 were women arrested in 2007 compared to 7,194 that were netted in 2006,“ adding that 5,937 cases have been opened in various courts across the country.
Sixty-five Tanzanians he said, have been arrested outside the country, citing Pakistan where he said 27 of them have reportedly been put under custody.
A whopping 225 tonnes of bhang, also known as cannabis, was seized in 2006 compared to a measly 59.9 tonnes of the drug in 2007 as well as an additional two tonnes of khat, commonly known as `mirungi`.
Commissioner Shekiondo also noted that more than 600 acres of cultivated bhang was destroyed in various regions of the country.
Morogoro topped the list with 625 acres of cultivated cannabis destroyed.
Other regions such as Mara, Tabora, Lindi, Mwanza, Iringa Pwani and Shinyanga witnessed the destruction of a combined 23.83 acres of the herb.
Issuing the report, which ranks the country`s third among the leading producers of bhang in Africa, the unit`s chief pointed out that hard drugs have continued to find their way into the country through air and water as well as by land.
According to the report, consumption of drugs is on the increase, while drug pushers and barons have developed new trafficking patterns that ensure them to remain in the business.
Shekiondo said his unit has engaged the Prevention and Control of Corruption Bureau (PCCB), pointing out that the fight against illicit drugs and their use in the country needs concerted efforts.
The head of the demonstration in Madrid on Saturday – Photo EFE
It comes as the NATO assembly in Valencia hears Spain is to send more troops to Africa.
Thousands of people marched in Madrid on Saturday in demand for freedom and independence for the Western Sahara. The protestors said that there was a clear case of illegal forceful occupation in the area.
A manifesto was read out by three of Spain’s top actresses, Maribel Verdú, Luisa Martín and Verónica Forqué. They see Morocco as the occupying force, but hold Spain to blame for the situation for ‘abandoning’ the Sahara in 1974.
Meanwhile at the NATO annual assembly, which continues in Valencia until Tuesday, it was announced that Spain will be extending its military presence in Africa following the threat of terrorism and more illegal immigration. There is also concern about drug trafficking through the region.
Spanish Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, defended a political and military focus at the meeting on Afghanistan. He said that the Afghans should be helped to hold their own future elections, but said that Spain would not contribute to any new military force needed in the country.
Rodrigo Rato, the ex Director of the International Monetary Fund, commented that there is a great opportunity in the current economic crisis for free trade liberalisation.
KINSHASA – Olesegun Obasanjo, a United Nations envoy, has held talks with the leader of a Tutsi armed group that is fighting government forces in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in an attempt to mediate an end to the conflict.
Laurent Nkunda, a renegade general who leads the National Congress for the Defence of People (CNDP), met Obasanjo in the rebel-held town of Jomba in North Kivu province on Sunday.
The meeting came just hours after fresh fighting broke out between the CNDP and the DR Congo military.
“Heavy fighting broke out around 7am [05:00 GMT]” in Ndeko, a village close to the strategic town of Kanyabayonga, Lieutenant Colonel Jean-Paul Dietrich of Monuc, the UN mission in DR Congo, said.
‘No conditions’
On Saturday, Nkunda said he is ready to negotiate with DR Congo’s government.
“There are no conditions, we are asking only for negotiations, direct negotiations with our government and we ask him [Obasanjo] to get us a mediator,” he told Al Jazeera.
“But other things we cannot expect from him, because it will be a matter for talking with our government.”
Obasanjo had already met Joseph Kabila, DR Congo’s president, in the capital Kinshasa.
More than 250,000 people have been displaced by fighting between the army and the CNDP, which claims to be acting in the interest of ethnic Tutsis in the region.
At least 100 people have been killed since fighting broke out in September, despite the presence of about 17,000 UN troops – the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world.
Kinshasa says that the CNDP is receiving assistance from neighbouring Rwanda, a claim that Kigali denies.
There are fears the country could slide into a ruinous war similar to the 1998-2002 conflict that drew in more than half a dozen African nations.
In th wake of that conflict, fighters backed by Uganda and Rwanda seized vast swaths of territory rich in coffee, gold and tin in the east.
Angola and Zimbabwe sent tanks and fighter planes to back DR Congo’s government in exchange for access to lucrative diamond and copper mines to the south and west.
Eastern Congo has been unstable since millions of refugees spilled across the border from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, which saw more than 500,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered.
YAOUNDE – “It is now certain that incarcerated publisher, Lewis Medjo will spend Christmas and New Year 2008 away from his family and friends at the Newbell prison in Douala”, report The Herald newspaper. It should be noted that Medjo was placed at the Newbell prison in Douala on pre-trial detention since his arrest last 22 September.
The Yaounde-based publisher of the private French language weekly, La Détente Libre was charged with propagating fallacious information. His incarceration has been linked to a publication in La Détente Libre of 7 August 2008. The report claimed that President Paul Biya had sacked Dipanda Mouelle, the Supreme Court magistrate famed for proclaiming election results in the country.
Cameroon President Paul Biya celebrates 26th anniversary in power amidst mix feelings
President of Cameroon Paul Biya has just celebrated the 26th anniversary of his accession to power amidst mixed feelings by Cameroonians. They are clearly disappointed with their head of state. That despite inheriting a prosperous Cameroon from his predecessor, Ahmadou Ahijdo, he has ended up plunging the country into political – socio – economic chaos. However, a few people see him as having recorded some success.
“Paul Biya’s 26 years in office have not been a complete failure. It is true that no regime is perfect. Biya, for the past 26 years, has achieved some successes as well as recorded some failures. His regime has succeeded in maintaining political stability and peace, and in bringing about democracy and freedom of speech and expression.
At some point in the not-too-distant future, we might just look back at 2008 as the year in which things really started to fall apart for the African National Congress (ANC).
Africa’s oldest liberation movement, which has enjoyed overwhelming political hegemony and electoral success since South Africa’s democratic breakthrough in 1994, is in deep trouble.
Crucially, this is not mainly as a result of the more recent domestic manifestations of the ever-widening crisis of capitalism nor of any kind of immediate threat to its 18-year hold on political power.
It is rather more simple — the “big happy family” whose members range from crypto-communists to die-hard capitalists, from ethno-nationalist chauvinists to cosmopolitan liberals — is beginning to break apart because there remains little to hold the heterogeneous clan together anymore.
There have always been factional battles raging within the ANC: the fights between the “radical” Youth League and the “conservative” older generation in the 1940s; the open warfare between the “black nationalists” and the multi-racial “Congress” in the 1950s; the regular stand-offs between the “workerists” and the “nationalists” in the 1970s and early to mid ’80s; and the skirmishes between the “exiles” and “internals” in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
However, none of these family fisticuffs ever resulted in a serious, sustained threat to the political, ideological or organisational integrity of the ANC, precisely because the anti-apartheid glue held, and healed, fast.
Post-1994
No surprise then, that after the political defeat of apartheid in 1994 and the ANC’s ascension to state power, that glue became increasingly obsolete.
With the rapid disappearance of the overarching historical “ties that bind”, internal battles began to exhibit much more explicit ideological, personal, racial, state power and occasionally ethnic characteristics.
Despite their often intense and public nature, these post-1994 battles did not result in the disintegration of the ANC family, mainly due to the fact that a new glue had been manufactured — obsequious loyalty to, and centralisation of power around, a “big man”.
At first it was Nelson Mandela, whose manipulated iconisation demanded general quiescence in the face of the neoliberal policies that were a spit in the face to the ANC’s mass constituency.
Then came Thabo Mbeki, whose Machiavellianism and personal insecurities required unquestioned obedience and self-censorship.
What then appeared to many to be a long-awaited internal revolt by ANC members at the 2007 Polokwane Conference (in the name of a mythical “reclamation of the ANC”) has turned out to be the latest instalment of the same “big man” politics, in the form of Jacob Zuma.
Zuma
The problem for Zuma, however, is that, unlike that of his predecessors, his rise to the ANC throne has taken place in a context in which the accumulation of post-1994 battles has produced ever-more vitriolic and alienating family spats.
Since Polokwane, South Africans have witnessed what can most aptly be described as continuous instalments of the ANC Fight Club. The ANC house has become too small for the large collection of bruised egos, fiefdoms of patronage, competing chauvinisms, wanna-be political kingmakers and ideological chameleons.
Building on the previous “counter-revolutionary” and “charlatan” name-calling that was the hallmark of Mbeki’s reign, the Zuma crowd has now added “dog”, “snake” and “cockroach”.
The second-layer transitional glue has finally peeled away and the edifice looks pretty ugly.
Indeed, the deterioration of the two metaphorical glues parallels the ANC’s own metamorphosis from a liberation movement designed to overthrow a racially based system of power overlaid with narrow class interests ,to a “modern” bourgeois political party designed to consolidate a class-based system of power overlaid with narrow racial interests.
As has been the case with all national liberation movements that have become post-independence political parties, the ANC has finally been caught in a web of its own contradictions. The consistent, if individually marked, political, organisational and economic bases for the consolidation and exercise of the ANC’s post-1994 power (and accompanying privilege for those at the helm) have planted the seeds of its present troubles.
Whether it be the often bitter retreat into the political shadows of a sizeable portion of the “old” leadership, the apparent ascendance of dumbed-down storm-troopers, the disintegration of its own activist grassroots structures, the socio-political resistance of its “natural” constituencies, the spectacle of professed communists and “radical” unionists embracing socially reactionary positions or the imminent arrival of an ANC breakaway party led by a clutch of former senior ANC leaders — the bottom line is: the ANC is in terminal decline.
Consequences
The immediate consequences of the ANC’s descent into the morass of its own making will be negative for the majority of South Africans.
On the one hand, Zuma’s ANC will remain largely true to the organisation’s commitment to macro-economic policies that will further consolidate the class interests of the old and new members of the capitalist class, minimal redistribution to the poor notwithstanding.
On the other hand, the Zuma crowd’s thinly veiled misogyny, his pronouncements that the way to deal with rampant crime is to deny bail to criminals and the answer to teenage pregnancies in poor communities is to take babies away from their mothers, foreshadow a potentially reactionary turn towards a pseudo-“traditionalist” social fascism.
However, on the political/organisational front the outlook is a bit more heartening. The space that has been opening up for the past several years as a result of the struggles of workers and poor communities will continue to provide new opportunities for meaningful opposition.
While the ANC will no doubt emerge triumphant from the 2009 national elections, the mere presence of a competitor emerging out of its own senior ranks, despite its centre-right character, has destroyed the ANC’s propaganda mantra of perpetual “organisational unity at all costs” and presages healthier electoral competition.
Like the often heroically infused yet tragic series of events that give Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart its timeless title, the ANC’s falling apart has been in the making for a long time. It will continue for sometime to come.
Unlike Achebe’s story, however, this is no fiction.
OUAGADOUGOU (AFP) – At least 66 people died Saturday when a bus and a truck collided and caught fire in Burkina Faso in one of West Africa’s worst road accidents, the transport minister said.
“We bemoan 96 victims, of whom 66 have died,” Gilbert Noel Ouedraogo said. “Of the 66, 55 bodies were completely charred. There are 30 injured admitted in hospital.”
Earlier court prosecutor Maiza Compaore told AFP by telephone from the site of the accident near Boromo, 167 kilometres (105 miles) west of the capital Ouagadougou, that the two vehicles caught fire.
“The scene is gruesome … there are bodies on the road, some are in the wreckage, there are charred bodies which are still being removed. It’s really horrible.”
She said the bus driver, who was carrying a passenger list, had survived but was still too shocked to be questioned by police.
The bus and the truck carrying sugar had collided around 5:30 am (0530 GMT) six kilometres from Boromo, Compaore had said.
Burkina Faso’s minister for social action, Pascaline Tamini, expressing profound sadness, offered the condolences of President Blaise Compaore, Prime Minister Tertius Zongo and the government.
Roads in West African countries are notoriously dangerous, especially at night.
In May 46 Nigerian soldiers returning from an African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur, Sudan, were killed in a collision between a petrol tanker and an army convoy.
In March 2007 in Guinea 70 people travelling in the back of a truck were killed when the vehicle overturned while crossing a narrow wooden bridge.
