The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
China was talking $40 bn in investment
Essential The Africa the Media Doesn't Tell You About
- Thread starter TommyHilltrigga
- Start date
China was talking $40 bn in investment
Red Shield
Global Domination
40bil in investment, in the last 24hrs. Yea I can see why Nigeria did what it did.
Of course a sizable percentage of that will probably be squandered and stolen
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
We don't speak about North Africa often. Here's an interesting opinion piece.
The Arabs had a country
The Arabs had a country
The Arabs had a country
YOUSEF KHALIL
Nasser, King Faisal, and Yasser Arafat in 1970. Image via Wiki Commons.
The death of Fidel Castro prompted some debate in the West. Many commentators concluded that the Cuban revolution’s descent into authoritarianism outweighed its contributions to the struggle for independence in Latin America and the Third World. Others have celebrated Castro as a hero of Third World liberation. For many in the West, it is puzzling to see the likes of Castro venerated as a hero. Perhaps the legacies of leaders such as Thomas Sankara, Hugo Chavez or Castro are only fully intelligible from a perspective that de-centers the West. From that perspective, victories – however flawed or fleeting – are cause for jubilation. Leadership like that of Castro’s broadened the horizon of political possibilities, and his internationalism and commitment to social revolution at home proved that revolution itself, however flawed, was indeed possible.
In the Arab world, there is no figure that embodies these ideals and contradictions than the second president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Himself a comrade of the late Castro, and leading figure of the non-aligned movement, Nasser counted among his sincere allies the likes of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Che Guevera and Patrice Lumumba. He led the nationalization of the Suez Canal and subsequent confrontation with the British, French and Israeli militaries in 1956, which was not just an Egyptian or Arab victory, it was a victory for all colonized people, a reversal of one the glaring injustices of colonialism.
Nasserism became a dominant ideology in the Arab world, and inspired a wave of “republican” coups and revolutions; Jordan and Iraq in 1958, Yemen in 1962, Algeria in 1964, Sudan and Libya in 1969, Jordan again in 1970. Central to Nasserism, and the ideologically similar Baathism, was the impulse to reverse the dismemberment of the Arab world in the wake of the World War I through the eventual creation of a single pan-Arab state, “from the Ocean to Gulf.”
The most successful experiment in this proposed political union was between Egypt and Syria from 1958 to 1961. Political instability had wracked Syria since the current state was established as part of the Sykes-Picot agreement between colonial powers Britain and France in 1918. In 1958, the Syrian government proposed immediate unification with Egypt as a way to stabilize Syria and finalize a long-standing process of integration between the two states in pursuit of Arab unity. Though the unification was brief – undone in a coup led by Baathists in 1961 – it was welcomed with “overwhelming support” by the Arab masses, as Tareq Y. Ismael argued in his 1976 book, The Arab Left.
Even in death, Nasser was a man of his era. His passing in 1970 came as the Arab world was still reeling from the successful Israeli attack on Egypt in 1967, which was ultimately the death-knell of pan-Arabism and Nasserism. A Lebanese newspaper headline captured the significance of his death best, declaring: “One hundred million human beings – the Arabs – are orphans. There is nothing greater than this man who is gone, and nothing is greater than the gap he has left behind.”
Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat, worked diligently to undo much of the progress Egypt made under his predecessor’s reign, pivoting towards the West in foreign policy and initiating a painful economic liberalization that created the social and political conditions that caused the Arab revolutions of four decades later. Sadat’s agreement to forge a separate peace with Israel completed Egypt’s transition from the leader of the Arab world to a regional pariah. With the Arab world’s most powerful and populous country effectively removed from the Palestinian theater, the Arab states retreated inward and non-interference became the rule in their relations. Domestically, Sadat began the long process of neoliberal economic restructuring.
For some, the idea that Nasser’s image would be raised by Egyptian protesters in 2011 battling the very apparatus he built in Egypt, is a contradiction that cannot be resolved. Such a perspective fails to understand that Nasser is not remembered by most as a military dictator. Rather, he represents a bygone era in which principled opposition to a world system built upon and the exploitation of the Third World was a viable political project. Nasser, like Castro, like Chavez, like Sankara, symbolized the Third World’s dignified opposition to the very conditions that created it.
For Arab revolutionaries in 2016, that dignity remains elusive. The fall of Aleppo in Syria is but the latest in a series of crushing defeats. The euphoria of 2011 has given way to despair and tragedy almost everywhere in the region, and every concession to the revolution has been brutally rolled back. The ancien regimes have handled the challenge of 2011 more adeptly than anyone could have imagined.
In the Arab world, there is no other figure that embodies this counterrevolution more than the sixth president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. His regime positioned itself as the continuation of the 2011 revolution, while stamping out any trace of it that remained. El-Sisi is attempting to coopt Nasser’s image in his propaganda, but he is nothing more than the farce to Nasser’s tragedy. Nasserism was legitimated by populist economic policy and anti-imperialism through pan-Arabism. El-Sisi can lay claim to none of these aspects of Nasser’s legacy. He has continued the process of neoliberal economic restructuring set forth by Sadat and acted as rear-gunner for Israeli colonialism on the ground, and most recently for incoming U.S. President Donald Trump at the UN Security Council.
It is perhaps in “the Arab sphere,” to use the parlance of Nasserism, that El-Sisi has most perfectly become Nasser’s inverse. His foreign adventures are a departure from the isolation of Sadat and Hosni Mubarak, but they have served the forces of counterrevolution at every turn. The Egyptian regime has entered the Libyan quagmire on the side of General Khalifa Haftar, who hopes to become “Libya’s Sisi”. Egypt was also an early member in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, a familiar battlefield for Egyptian military, though in the 1960s, the Egyptians were going to war against the Saudis and their British backers.
But the reports of an Egyptian intervention in Syria to support the Baathist regime strike the most historic chord. Just as it was in 1958, Syria has become the epicenter of a crisis plaguing the wider Arab world, and Egypt, in the midst of its own political turmoil, is entering the fray. But where Nasser’s unification with Syria represented the hope that the Arab world could transcend the divisions it inherited from the colonial masters – the hope that a revolutionary moment could be exported – El-Sisi’s is the completion of Egypt’s counter-revolutionary turn. For Arabs leaders, it seems, there is only unity in betrayal.
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/13/world/africa/sudan-sanctions.html?_r=0
United States to Lift Sudan Sanctions
- Sudan and lift trade sanctions, Obama administration officials said late Thursday.
Sudan is one of the poorest, most isolated and most violent countries in Africa, and for years the United States has imposed punitive measures against it in a largely unsuccessful attempt to get the Sudanese government to stop killing its own people.
On Friday, the Obama administration will announce a new Sudan strategy. For the first time since the 1990s, the nation will be able to trade extensively with the United States, allowing it to buy goods like tractors and spare parts and attract much-needed investment in its collapsing economy.
In return, Sudan will improve access for aid groups, stop supporting rebels in neighboring South Sudan, cease the bombing of insurgent territory and cooperate with American intelligence agents.
American officials said Sudan had already shown important progress on a number of these fronts. But to make sure the progress continues, the executive order that President Obama plans to sign on Friday, days before leaving office, will have a six-month review period. If Sudan fails to live up to its commitments, the embargo can be reinstated.
Analysts said good relations with Sudan could strengthen moderate voices within the country and give the Sudanese government incentives to refrain from the brutal tactics that have defined it for decades.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton imposed a comprehensive trade embargo against Sudan and blocked the assets of the Sudanese government, which was suspected of sponsoring international terrorism. In the mid-1990s, Osama bin Laden lived in Khartoum, the capital, as a guest of Sudan’s government.
In 1998, Bin Laden’s agents blew up the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. In retaliation, Mr. Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike against a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum.
Since then, American-Sudanese relations have steadily soured. The conflict in Darfur, a vast desert region of western Sudan, was a low point. After rebels in Darfur staged an uprising in 2003, Sudanese security services and their militia allies slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians, leading to condemnation around the world, genocide charges at the International Criminal Court against Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and a new round of American sanctions.
American officials said Thursday that the American demand that Mr. Bashir be held accountable had not changed. Neither has Sudan’s status as one of the few countries, along with Iran and Syria, that remain on the American government’s list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Sales of military equipment will still be prohibited, and some Sudanese militia and rebel leaders will still face sanctions.
But the Obama administration is clearly trying to open a door to Sudan. There is intense discontent across the country, and its economy is imploding. American officials have argued for years that it was time to help Sudan dig itself out of the hole it had created.
Officials divulged Thursday that the Sudanese government had allowed two visits by American operatives to a restricted border area near Libya, which they cited as evidence of a new spirit of cooperation on counterterrorism efforts.
In addition to continuing violence in Darfur, several other serious conflicts are raging in southern and central Sudan, along with a civil war in newly independent South Sudan, which Sudan has been suspected of inflaming with covert arms shipments.
Eric Reeves, one of the leading American academic voices on Sudan, said he was “appalled” that the American government was lifting sanctions.
He said that Sudan’s military-dominated government continued to commit grave human rights abuses and atrocities, and he noted that just last week Sudanese security services killed more than 10 civilians in Darfur.
“There is no reason to believe the guys in charge have changed their stripes,” said Mr. Reeves, a senior fellow at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. “These guys are the worst of the worst.”
Obama administration officials said that they had briefed President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team, but that they did not know if Mr. Trump would stick with a policy of warmer relations with Sudan.
They said that Sudan had a long way to go in terms of respecting human rights, but that better relations could help increase American leverage.
Mr. Reeves said he thought that the American government was being manipulated and that the Obama administration had made a “deal with the devil.”
thatrapsfan
Superstar
Reeves is being hyperbolic as hell. I thought sanctions were a means to an end. The end (being the fall or weakening of Bashir's regime) has not come close to being achieved. Removing economic sanctions that have hurt the Sudanese population at large more than anything isn't akin to making a deal with the devil.
I find Obama's FP as pragmatic and non-interventionist as an American one has ever been, yet leftists still act like he was Bush on steroids cause of drones.
Senegal: Renewable energy gets a boost
January 12, 2017 • Mining & Energy, Top Stories, West Africa
ENGIE will be developing solar energy forfor individuals in multi-occupancy or individual housing.
On Wednesday Senegalese company ENGIE announced their partnership with ANER, the National Renewable Energies Agency, to fast track the development of renewable energies in the country.
This comes as a result of ENGIE, being selected for the Dakar TER project in partnership with Thales for the design and production of infrastructure and systems. The contract totaling an estimated $238 million.
The first part of this agreement involves the development of solar energy for individuals in multi-occupancy or individual housing. The aim is to study the initial deployment of these solutions to 11,000 households in the city of Dakar and its suburbs. The main focus will be on photovoltaic solar panels for the production of electricity and solar water-heaters for the production of hot water. Together, ANER and ENGIE will look into financing solutions for this equipment to facilitate their deployment to clients.
ENGIE is aiming to use its technical experience and financial capacity to support Senegal’s energy policy, in close partnership with local stakeholders
As part of this agreement, ENGIE also commits to market energy performance contracts (EPC) to industrial operators and the tertiary sector in large urban communities in Senegal. The goal is to reduce sites’ energy consumption and help to balance the Senegalese electrical system. In Senegal, ENGIE will adapt the concept of EPC that it has used in all its industrial client and large tertiary markets around the world for many years.
The final part of this agreement involves ENGIE’s participation in an industrial cluster to promote renewable energies, particularly by professional training actions and strengthening the local industrial network.
Isabelle Kocher, ENGIE CEO singing the deal. (source: ENGIE)
Isabelle Kocher, ENGIE CEO, declared: “ENGIE is aiming to use its technical experience and financial capacity to support Senegal’s energy policy, in close partnership with local stakeholders. The agreement we have signed today reflects our desire to be a major stakeholder in renewable energies and services in Africa and to solve the huge energy supply problems found on the continent.”
Staff writer
January 12, 2017 • Mining & Energy, Top Stories, West Africa
ENGIE will be developing solar energy forfor individuals in multi-occupancy or individual housing.
On Wednesday Senegalese company ENGIE announced their partnership with ANER, the National Renewable Energies Agency, to fast track the development of renewable energies in the country.
This comes as a result of ENGIE, being selected for the Dakar TER project in partnership with Thales for the design and production of infrastructure and systems. The contract totaling an estimated $238 million.
The first part of this agreement involves the development of solar energy for individuals in multi-occupancy or individual housing. The aim is to study the initial deployment of these solutions to 11,000 households in the city of Dakar and its suburbs. The main focus will be on photovoltaic solar panels for the production of electricity and solar water-heaters for the production of hot water. Together, ANER and ENGIE will look into financing solutions for this equipment to facilitate their deployment to clients.
ENGIE is aiming to use its technical experience and financial capacity to support Senegal’s energy policy, in close partnership with local stakeholders
As part of this agreement, ENGIE also commits to market energy performance contracts (EPC) to industrial operators and the tertiary sector in large urban communities in Senegal. The goal is to reduce sites’ energy consumption and help to balance the Senegalese electrical system. In Senegal, ENGIE will adapt the concept of EPC that it has used in all its industrial client and large tertiary markets around the world for many years.
The final part of this agreement involves ENGIE’s participation in an industrial cluster to promote renewable energies, particularly by professional training actions and strengthening the local industrial network.
Isabelle Kocher, ENGIE CEO singing the deal. (source: ENGIE)
Isabelle Kocher, ENGIE CEO, declared: “ENGIE is aiming to use its technical experience and financial capacity to support Senegal’s energy policy, in close partnership with local stakeholders. The agreement we have signed today reflects our desire to be a major stakeholder in renewable energies and services in Africa and to solve the huge energy supply problems found on the continent.”
Staff writer
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
Nigeria further entrenches French hegemony in Africa. Shameful.
Buhari seeks more French assistance for Africa - The Nation Nigeria
Buhari seeks more French assistance for Africa - The Nation Nigeria
Frangala
All Star
French hedgemony is already entrenched due to spineless Francophone governments that don't have a solid and respectful army to ward off these terrorist threats. I just learned that a lot of the West and Central African countries (apart from DRC) have their currencies printed in France. Another worthless summit in Bamako. France is not in Africa for African interests how hard is that to understand for these worthless heads of state.
The Odum of Ala Igbo
Hail Biafra!
Nigeria should be the base of anti-French resistance in West Africa. The French even threatened to level Kano if Nigeria took the disputed Bakassi Peninsula. This is ridiculous. If Buhari thinks he can manipulate/trust the French, he's dead wrong. I detest the imbecile.
Hundreds March Against Ivory Trade in Tanzania
DAR ES SALAM —
More than 550 people took to the streets of Tanzania’s biggest city on Saturday morning to protest the trade in ivory.
The "Walk for Elephants" march was co-organized by the Chinese Embassy in Tanzania and the Tanzania-China Friendship Promotion Association. Demonstrators, including the Chinese ambassador and many from the city’s Chinese community, walked five kilometers and called for the protection of elephants.
Tanzania is an epicenter of the African elephant poaching crisis. In 2015, a government census suggested the country had lost 60 percent of its elephants to poaching in just five years. Elephants are mainly poached for their tusks, which are turned into ornate ivory carvings.
Investigations into the trade have pointed to China as the leading destination for poached tusks.
The Chinese community in Africa is determined to turn around the negative perception of their country.
“There has always been a huge communication gap,” said Hongxiang Huang, an investigative journalist and conservationist who helped organize the event. “We’re doing this so the world can know that not all Chinese are bad, there are many many good Chinese people as well.”
One demonstrator, Jimmy Liguo, who works for Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, participated in the march with his wife and son. He said his family was disappointed by news stories this year about Chinese nationals involved in the ivory trade in Africa.
“We’ve been living in Tanzania for two years, so for Chinese people here we love elephants, so we want everyone to protect elephants,” said Liguo.
The march also served to educate Chinese expats in Tanzania about Africa’s poaching crisis.
“I want more of our people to know that the animals, the wildlife are the best friends of human beings,” said Youqing Lu, the Chinese ambassador to Tanzania. “Everyone should be involved in protecting wildlife, because we are one family.”
Many Tanzanian celebrities and activists also took part in the march. WildAid ambassador and singer Ben Pol called for Tanzanians to support the movement against poaching.
“This is important for my country, for our future,” said Pol. “People need to support this movement against poaching through any means: social media, organizing a march like this, word of mouth.”
The walk followed a December Chinese government announcement that it will close its domestic ivory market by the end of 2017. The decision has been hailed by conservationists as a game changer for the ivory trade.
“The ban is very important, because for those who facilitate and support killers of elephants, they will now get a message that the market is gone, so why go for killing an elephant,” said Elisifa Ngowi, a top intelligence officer with the PAMS Foundation, a conservation NGO in Tanzania.
Ngowi was responsible for leading a task force that has arrested hundreds of poachers, including Yang Feng Glan dubbed the "Queen of Ivory" who has been charged with smuggling at least 706 elephant tusks.
Ngowi warned that though China’s ivory ban is a win for Tanzania’s elephants, new markets are emerging in other Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia.
Huang agrees more works needs to be done.
“Even if it’s now [better] for elephants, what about pangolins, rhinos, there are still many other species that need to be protected.”
The Chinese ambassador said his government was committed to supporting the Tanzanian government in their continued fight against poaching in the country.
He hopes to make the march an annual event.
Hundreds March Against Ivory Trade in Tanzania
The ivory trade should have been deaded a long time ago.
DAR ES SALAM —
More than 550 people took to the streets of Tanzania’s biggest city on Saturday morning to protest the trade in ivory.
The "Walk for Elephants" march was co-organized by the Chinese Embassy in Tanzania and the Tanzania-China Friendship Promotion Association. Demonstrators, including the Chinese ambassador and many from the city’s Chinese community, walked five kilometers and called for the protection of elephants.
Tanzania is an epicenter of the African elephant poaching crisis. In 2015, a government census suggested the country had lost 60 percent of its elephants to poaching in just five years. Elephants are mainly poached for their tusks, which are turned into ornate ivory carvings.
Investigations into the trade have pointed to China as the leading destination for poached tusks.
The Chinese community in Africa is determined to turn around the negative perception of their country.
“There has always been a huge communication gap,” said Hongxiang Huang, an investigative journalist and conservationist who helped organize the event. “We’re doing this so the world can know that not all Chinese are bad, there are many many good Chinese people as well.”
One demonstrator, Jimmy Liguo, who works for Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, participated in the march with his wife and son. He said his family was disappointed by news stories this year about Chinese nationals involved in the ivory trade in Africa.
“We’ve been living in Tanzania for two years, so for Chinese people here we love elephants, so we want everyone to protect elephants,” said Liguo.
The march also served to educate Chinese expats in Tanzania about Africa’s poaching crisis.
“I want more of our people to know that the animals, the wildlife are the best friends of human beings,” said Youqing Lu, the Chinese ambassador to Tanzania. “Everyone should be involved in protecting wildlife, because we are one family.”
Many Tanzanian celebrities and activists also took part in the march. WildAid ambassador and singer Ben Pol called for Tanzanians to support the movement against poaching.
“This is important for my country, for our future,” said Pol. “People need to support this movement against poaching through any means: social media, organizing a march like this, word of mouth.”
The walk followed a December Chinese government announcement that it will close its domestic ivory market by the end of 2017. The decision has been hailed by conservationists as a game changer for the ivory trade.
“The ban is very important, because for those who facilitate and support killers of elephants, they will now get a message that the market is gone, so why go for killing an elephant,” said Elisifa Ngowi, a top intelligence officer with the PAMS Foundation, a conservation NGO in Tanzania.
Ngowi was responsible for leading a task force that has arrested hundreds of poachers, including Yang Feng Glan dubbed the "Queen of Ivory" who has been charged with smuggling at least 706 elephant tusks.
Ngowi warned that though China’s ivory ban is a win for Tanzania’s elephants, new markets are emerging in other Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia.
Huang agrees more works needs to be done.
“Even if it’s now [better] for elephants, what about pangolins, rhinos, there are still many other species that need to be protected.”
The Chinese ambassador said his government was committed to supporting the Tanzanian government in their continued fight against poaching in the country.
He hopes to make the march an annual event.
Hundreds March Against Ivory Trade in Tanzania
The ivory trade should have been deaded a long time ago.
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thatrapsfan
Superstar
The currency issue is not that straight forward. It has provided currency stability for Franco countries and helped ease regional trade between them.The stability also encourages foreign investment. Its not coincidence that Franco countries with the CFA have among the highest percentage of regional trade between them in Africa. Also among the highest rates of foreign investment.
There can be economic critiques of the CFA, but the political critiques that entirely revolve around neocolonialism are neither accurate or effective. Reminds me of pro-Gbagbo rhetoric. CIV now is probably the best-performing African economy under the "neocolonial servant" Ouattara. CIV still has unresolved political divisions but the idea that all Francophone govts are backward neocolonial outposts has always been caricature.
Frangala
All Star
As far as monetary policy, I am not knowledgeable on its impact and influence so I will defer to you since you know more about it than me. One thing I do know is that the cost of capital (interest rates) is so much higher for an entrepreneur in CFA zone than it is in France (13% vs. 3%). I also saw an interview from this Togolese economist who had a book about the whole thing and said that when he was traveling to Gabon he had to convert his Togolese CFA to Euros and then convert those Euros to Gabonese CFA for use in Gabon.
THE CIV economic growth is not inclusive. Foreign investment in Africa in general rarely trickles down to the masses. The French (I have been there many times and have tons of family members who live there) will never admit this but they want to become a world superpower and feel some type of way when they see the US and two European nations (UK & Germany) ahead of them in terms of geopolitical influence and economic prosperity. As a result, Africa and specific African markets is a gateway to retaining that old colonial glory and a springboard to superpower status.
They are in industries such as Uranium in Chad, Oil in Gabon (Total-AFCON sponsor). These are extractive industries that do not create inclusive growth for the whole economy in other words they don't create jobs and the main beneficiaries is the foreign firm that is extracting the raw resources cheaply and selling it the value added material at a much higher prices and then the host African country gets to record the taxation (rent money) on those raw material exports as growth. That is the mentality and how business works in Francophone Africa for the most part. The ultimate losers are African citizens and these summits are pointless I have been to some of them (not of this stature but many Africa business summits). The economic model is just to create a small political/economic elite over the masses.
Instead of relying on this economic model, an sound monetary policy that reduces the cost of borrowing capital can truly stimulate sustainable and inclusive growth.
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