The Tanzanian MP recounts the appalling story in a tone of sadness and horror. A woman named Salma had been told by her family to dress her baby entirely in black and to lay the little girl in a hut, alone. ‘The mother didn’t understand, but she obeyed the elders,’ said Al-Shaymaa Kwegyir.
‘Some hours later, unknown men arrived and went straight to the hut. They used a machete to cut off the child’s legs. Then they slit her throat and poured the blood into a pot and drank it.’
Amid a spate of at least 29 murders of albinos in Tanzania, Kwegyir, herself an albino, has become one of the country’s most prominent political campaigners on the issue. She cited evidence that killers acting for witch doctors are turning to cannibalism alongside their quest for lucrative body parts as magic charms.
Buyers from as far away as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Kenya and Uganda believe the legs, genitals, eyes and hair of people with albinism can help them achieve instant wealth. The youngest victim so far was seven months old.
Kwegyir, 48, had met Salma in her village in the Mwanga district near Kilimanjaro. ‘It is the first cannibalistic case, but in other respects it is a classic example. Someone in the extended family who has links with a witch doctor will help set up the abduction or killing. These murders are inspired by ignorance and greed. An albino hand is selling for two million shillings (£1,200),’ she said.
Despite government moves to protect albinos – who have an inherited gene disorder which results in a lack of pigmentation and can produce near-blindness – the targeted murders, which were first reported a year ago, are continuing. ‘Two weeks pass and we think it’s getting better, then another one happens,’ said Kwegyir, who was appointed to parliament in April by President Jakaya Kikwete in order to combat prejudice.
The murders are the result of seemingly conflicting beliefs spread by witch doctors, who are still consulted by many of Tanzania’s 40 million-strong population, that albinos are either cursed or have supernatural properties. Some fishermen believe that, if they weave the red hair from an albino into their nets, fish will be attracted by the golden glimmer. Miners for gold, rubies and tanzanite are reported to pay large sums for juju (magic) amulets, which they wear around their necks or strapped to their arms and which are made up with a potion mixed from albino body parts. Others are said to bury the bones of albinos in the ground they are digging.
A relative haven of safety for Tanzania’s albinos is the small park outside the single-storey wards of Dar es Salaam’s Cancer Institute. In alleys leading between the wards, albinos with bandages on their heads and feet, or slings on their arms, wait for check-ups.
They have russet-coloured hair and milky-white skin, but their facial features are African. Many are covered in welts, scabs and burns. Cancer is their greatest killer and, whereas albinos in developed countries can hope to live until normal old age, Africans who have the condition rarely survive beyond the age of 40.
Zihada Msembo said her greatest enemy used to be the sun. Now she walks in fear wherever she goes. ‘In the streets you hear people plotting. They say “look at the zeru [ghost]. We can get him”. We are terrified to go outside or to get into our beds at night.’
The hospital’s rundown gatehouse is the home of the Tanzanian Albino Society. Its chairman, Ernest Kimaya, 42, said the organisation ran on an annual government grant which he summarised as ‘equal to a week’s tea budget at State House’. Albinos need skin creams, spectacles and large-print books, but they receive no funding for these. Kimaya wears glasses but at his computer his nose is less than 10cm from the screen.
He said Tanzanian albinos had always faced discrimination in schools or in the workplace. ‘People believe a woman who has an albino child has been cursed and that the whole family will now suffer bad luck. In olden days midwives killed the babies at birth but now that there are health centres, albino babies do survive.’
Kimaya’s society, probably Africa’s oldest albino association, set up in 1980, feels powerless in the face of the attacks. ‘The people who are killing us are witch doctors or agents for them. What is happening is mad and horrible,’ Kimaya said.
Kimaya said the superstition of money-making had always existed but used to be confined to remote areas. Tanzania’s recent minerals boom, which has attracted thousands of people to try their luck in small-scale mining, may have contributed to the spread of the belief. Murders are now also reported in neighbouring countries and Kikwete has asked other heads of state in the Southern African Development Community to act to stamp out the killings.
Last week the Daily News reported the arrest of a 35-year-old fisherman at Lake Tanganyika who had allegedly attempted to sell his 24-year-old albino wife to two businessmen from the Democratic Republic of Congo for 3.6m shillings (about £2,000). Another report told of a man caught at the border carrying a bag containing a baby’s head. He told police that a Tanzanian witch doctor had offered to pay him according to the weight of the head.
More than 170 people, most of them witch doctors, have been arrested in Tanzania this year; 53 are in custody, but Kimaya wants firmer, swifter action. ‘We need money to pay a lawyer. The government has ordered the police to carry out a census of albinos, so that we know how many of us there are,’ he said.
‘They have also been instructed to work with villagers to protect us and to escort albino children to school. It is a big step forward, but we urgently need prosecutions to begin so that Tanzanians hear of this injustice,’ added Kimaya, who is one of three albino siblings out of seven children in his family. He is married to a black woman and their four children are black.
Even though albinism exists in Europe and North America, where it affects one in 20,000 people, it is far more widespread in Africa. One of the continent’s music stars, Salif Keita from Mali, is an albino. One study has put the Tanzanian ratio at one in 4,000 people. Kimaya believes there are 370,000 albinos in Tanzania. Some researchers have suggested that the source of the albino gene can be traced to the east coast of Africa.
Despite government efforts and growing pressure from abroad, including a motion condemning the events in Tanzania in September in the European Parliament, the country’s albinos are still living in fear.
Kwegyir was an activist for the ruling party and an information officer at Dar es Salaam airport before becoming an MP. She said there was an urgent need for the international community to support albinos: ‘If we can have skin creams, books and spectacles, this will help us to lead more normal lives and to come out of the shadows and combat prejudice.’
For the moment the safety of albinos is her prime concern. ‘On 19 October we staged a demonstration in Dar es Salaam to raise awareness of our situation. Many people were brave and came out. But that same evening one of the demonstrators was followed home, grabbed, and the assailants tried to hack off one of her arms. This was left hanging and later had to be amputated. The attackers cut off the other arm and ran away.
‘Now she is living in constant terror because she won’t be able to fight back if they come after her a second time.’
VICTORIA (Reuters) – The International Monetary Fund has agreed a two-year $26-million rescue package for the deeply indebted Seychelles’ economy, but the country’s central bank warned on Saturday it would not be enough on its own.
The Indian Ocean islands, best known as a luxury tourism destination but reeling from the global financial crisis, will receive some $9.1 million now as they struggle with a foreign debt burden previously valued at $800 million.
Annual inflation is expected to climb to 40 percent this month from 30 percent previously due to a fall in the local currency after it was floated. Residents say food prices have been rising fast and accuse some local traders of hoarding.
“It is certainly not enough but the important thing is the IMF serves as a catalyst and will open doors to other donors to come in,” Pierre Laporte, central bank governor, told Reuters.
Analysts predict a painful path to recovery while the central bank sees the economy slowing to 3.1 percent growth this year, and possibly contracting in 2009. The palm-fringed islands have a population of just 85,000.
The archipelago relies heavily on imports, but the turmoil on world financial markets has left foreign reserves severely depleted. Last month, the government failed to service an interest payment on $230 million of bonds maturing in 2011.
The Fund said late on Friday that it had approved the plan to support the Seychelles’ “bold economic reforms”, but that its disbursements would be subject to performance.
FOCUS ON REFORMS
As part of its reform package, the government lifted long-standing currency exchange controls earlier this month, prompting a 48 percent slide in the value of the rupee .
The IMF said the authorities had made a good start, and it praised the archipelago for its commitment to far-reaching measures aimed at tackling macroeconomic imbalances that have built up over years. But it said further steps were needed.
“Strong fiscal policy reforms, including the removal of tax exemptions and strengthening of public financial management, need to be sustained in order to secure substantial primary surpluses over the medium term,” it said in a statement.
Laporte said the IMF funds would help consolidate the country’s international reserve target of $19 million for the end of December.
“We are already above that target. This immediate $9.1 million will allow us to cement that reserve and maybe inject a little into the system,” he said.
Finance Minister Danny Faure said the challenge was to stimulate a financial system that remains largely reliant on tourists from rich nations — many of whose own economies are now on the brink of recession.
“The programme we have with the IMF is adjustable,” Faure told Reuters in Victoria. “If, for example, tourism drops there is room to negotiate again.” (Additional reporting by Richard Lough in Port Louis; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Janet Lawrence)
The head of the EU’s electoral mission in Guinea Bissau said Saturday on the eve of a parliamentary poll that “everything is ready” for the ballot, seen as an important step to stabilise the country.
Johan Van Hecke hailed the “remarkable work” of the country’s national electoral commission and said there has been progress from the 2005 presidential poll, especially in terms of logistical operations.”The staff at the national electoral commission and the people in the regions have done some remarkable work,” Van Hecke said.
“We’ve toured the country (and) we think it’s ready for the elections.”The international community has sent more than 150 observers, 50 with the EU mission, and spent more than eight million dollars (six million euros) to help organise the vote. Guinea Bissau has seen drug trading flourish recently, 10 years after the end of its 1998-1999 civil war.
Ranked as one of the world’s poorest nations, it has become a major transit point for cocaine coming from Latin America en route to the lucrative European markets.Van Hecke however criticised the government and parliament for refusing to follow the EU mission’s recommendations, especially their decision not to grant the electoral commission financial independence. He also expressed concern over the lack of clarity as to what would happen in the event of a contentious result.”It’s not exactly clear whether the candidates should launch their legal challenges with the national electoral commission or the Supreme Court,” he said.
Some 540,000 people are expected to go to the polls Sunday.International experts say the country, which lists peanut exports as its biggest source of income, has become Africa’s first “narco-state”: taken over and controlled by drug cartels with nonexistent law enforcement.
Since presidential elections in 2005 the West African country has been ruled by Joao Bernardo Veira, a former army general who had been in power for nearly 20 years, from 1980 until 1999, when he was ousted in a coup.Experts say that the poor and politically unstable country does not have strong enough state institutions to take on the international drugs cartels.
NEW DELHI: Even as the UN Security Council moves towards pumping in more peace-keeping troops into war-ravaged Congo, India has for now virtually ruled out sending additional soldiers to the Central African nation.
India is already the largest troop contributor to the UN peace-keeping mission in Congo (MONUC) with 4,700 soldiers, followed by Pakistan with 3,551 soldiers. With a total of 17,000 troops, MONUC is currently the largest and most expensive UN peace-keeping mission around the globe.
But the blue-helmeted soldiers, primarily Indians, deployed in the eastern province of North Kivu in Congo, are increasingly getting sucked directly into the raging conflict between government and rebels forces in the region.
After defence minister A K Antony recently expressed “serious concern” over the developments in Congo, sources said his ministry has now told the external affairs ministry that there is no need to rush additional troops to Congo unless it is felt that it would “serve some major strategic or politico-economic interest” of India.
This came even as a battalion of 3rd Gorkha Rifles left for Congo on Friday as part of the “routine turnover” of Indian battalions deployed in MONUC. “The planes taking them to Congo will return with a Sikh Light Infantry battalion completing its tenure there. With European and other countries reluctant to strengthen MONUC, our troops should not become cannon-fodder,” said a defence ministry source.
As it is, there is mounting pressure on Indian troops in Congo to undertake “unilateral armed action” for any breach of peace against both the rapidly-advancing rebel forces led by Tutsi warlord General Laurent Nkunda as well as the poorly-trained and ill-disciplined Congo government forces “increasing running amok” with raping and looting sprees.
“But UNSC will have to revise the existing mandate to allow unilateral action. Even if it is done, the defence ministry is not in favour of sending more troops,” said the source.
The Indian reading of the situation is that western powers are playing their “own games” in the mineral-rich Congo, with a few even “sympathetic” to Rwanda’s support to rebel groups like Nkunda’s CNDP (National Congress for the Defence of the People).
With European countries unwilling to send troops to the vastly over-stretched MONUC, Indian and other troops have established COBs (company-operating bases) and MOBs (mobile-operating bases) in the “hot zones” in the North Kivu province, the epicentre of the conflict.
Except for a few incidents, which led to an Indian Lt-Col and a couple of others being injured recently, apart from a few rockets being fired on UN armoured personnel carriers, the warring groups have refrained from directly attacking the peace-keepers till now.
But there is the distinct possibility of the peace-keepers getting caught in the cross-fire since government forces now often use the cover of COBs and MOBs of MONUC to fire rocket and mortar shells at rebel forces.
With the January 2008 ceasefire agreement between all warring groups shredded to tatters by the escalating battle, estimates suggest over 250,000 people have been displaced in the North Kivu province since August.
After overrunning several important towns and villages in the region, the rebel forces are now threatening to take over North Kivu’s capital of Goma, which has a population of around 500,000.
There is also the fear that the conflict will spill over into other countries since Congo borders as many as nine other African nations, in what will be a repeat of the continent’s five-year war which touched all of them before it ended in 2003.
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed has said Islamist insurgents now control most of the country, and have advanced to the edge of Mogadishu.
Mr Yusuf said there was no effective government in Somalia, and that insurgents were now able to carry out attacks in the capital at will.
The president was speaking to Somali parliamentarians in Kenya, a day after talks on forming a new cabinet failed.
Last month, regional grouping Igad set a deadline of 12 November for a deal.
The mandate of the Transitional Government of Somalia (TFG), formed in late 2004, is set to expire in August 2009.
Call for unity
President Yusuf was at his gloomiest on Saturday, addressing Somali MPs in neighbouring Kenya.
The government controls Mogadishu and Baidoa and people are killed there every day
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed
He said the Islamist insurgency, which looked as though it had been crushed two years ago following intervention by the Ethiopian army, was now as strong as ever.
Members of the al-Shabab group now controlled most of the country and had advanced to the suburbs of Mogadishu, as well as Baidoa, the home town of the parliament, he said.
“The government controls Mogadishu and Baidoa and people are killed there every day,” Mr Yusuf told the meeting in Nairobi.
“Islamists have taken over everywhere else, so if I ask you parliamentarians: do you know the situation we face? Who causes all these problems? We are to blame.”
Members of al-Shabab at a training camp outside Mogadishu (4 November 2008)
Mr Yusuf said the al-Shabab group now controlled most of the country
President Yusuf lamented that at this vital time when unity is needed, talks on forming a new transitional government had ended in failure.
He and Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein have been unable to agree on the make-up of a new cabinet, missing a deadline issued by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (Igad) last month.
In the meantime members of al-Shabab, which the US believes to be linked to al-Qaeda, have consolidated their hold on southern Somalia, meting out punishments on the population based on their interpretation of Islamic law.
They whipped 25 women and seven men for holding a traditional dance, which they said was forbidden.
In October, a girl was stoned to death in a crowded stadium in the port city of Kismayo. Aged just 13, she had been convicted of adultery after complaining she had been raped.
ADDIS ABABA – Dr. Worku Zewde and his wife, Zinash, came back to Ethiopia ten years ago after spending 21 years in the United States, where they had become American citizens.
“Going to the United States was not a shock for me,” Zewde recalls. “It was coming back to Ethiopia that was difficult.”
The Zewde’s had come home hoping to invest money they had earned while living in the United States.
“The policy for investing was so prohibitive—especially for foreigners,” he said. “There was a cap. You had to bring in half a million dollars if you wanted to invest. Nobody would risk investing that much money in Ethiopia at that time.”
After two years, and an effort by the Ethiopian government with the assistance of the World Bank funded Public Sector Capacity Building Project (PSCAP) to reform the investment sector, the Zewde’s were able to start a business — Knit to Finish, PLC. They have been a success story ever since. The company exports quality garments to the United States where they are sold at sporting goods stores. The garments are manufactured by over 350 employees, mostly women, just outside Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital.
Easing the process of doing business
Ethiopia’s Federal Investment Agency, the agency responsible for monitoring finances and investment, has dramatically improved its service delivery times and customer service, providing a more conducive environment for foreign investment. Ten years ago, it took an average 225 days to get a business license. Now it only takes half a day.
“There is definitely a sizeable difference in this country, which is keeping us going every day,” Zewde said. “We see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
This sense of great improvement in the business environment is shared by Ryiaz Shamji, a native of Uganda, who moved to Ethiopia ten years ago looking for investment opportunities.
Today, his family business, Golden Rose Agrofarms, exports 2.5 million roses per month. It also produces drinking water and a variety of consumer goods. When they got started, however, it wasn’t so easy.
“The whole idea of investment promotion was on a very different level,” said Shamji, whose company employs 830 people. “It wasn’t a question of incentivizing investors.
This is no longer the case, according to Shamji.
Government reforms
Efforts to reform the Federal Investment Agency began in February 1994 when a directive issued by the Council of Ministers mandated “one-stop shopping.” Previously, foreign investors had to visit many institutions, and the process was cumbersome. To accommodate this mandate, all of the varying processes from different ministries were brought into a single building. Even then, the burdensome and sometimes redundant processes remained the same.
A comprehensive study was commissioned in 2002 to look back at the previous 10 years. All stakeholders participated in the study which helped to generate recommendations. Government officials welcomed the recommendations, and in turn issued an even more comprehensive and radical transformation. The Federal Investment Agency was given the power to make decisions, and as a result redundancies were eliminated, processes were consolidated, and unnecessary procedures were abolished.
The Agency also embraced a culture of excellence, striving to do even more. The processing time for business licenses was reduced from 225 days to six hours in 2004, and then again to 3 ½ hours in 2006. The improvements in service delivery spread throughout the country to the regional trade and industry bureaus and city administrations.
Gaining investor trust
Understanding the value of the customer, the Agency now solicits customer feedback. Comments are systematically collected and analyzed on a weekly basis. Feedback, whether positive or negative, is shared with the relevant frontline staff, department or agency. This has led to a host of improvements.
Seifu Biratu, head of the Civil Service Reform Office for the Federal Investment Agency, collects the comment forms on a weekly basis.
“It has had a great effect on our frontline,” he said. “They know we are reading the comments so they are more conscientious in providing good customer service.”
Biratu’s colleague also heralds the improvements.
“What we have come to realize,” said Alemayehu Gebeta, head of the Licensing and Registration Department, “is that investors have become our diplomats. When they have a good experience, they tell others. They help us to attract other foreign investors.”
The numbers support Alemayehu’s claim. In 2003, 23 investment permits were issued. By 2006, that number had jumped to 1,000 permits issued.
Perhaps one of the most amazing feats of this success is that everything is still done manually. The agency is looking forward to achieving even greater efficiency once automation is introduced through the assistance of future PSCAP funding.
