Day: June 10, 2022

The militaries of Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria have hailed the success of a joint security operation they say has freed 4,500 civilians and killed more than 800 militants since late March.

The Multinational Joint Task Force agreed to extend Operation Lake Sanity during a meeting Thursday in the Cameroonian town of Mora, on the border with Chad and Nigeria. The task force commander, Nigerian Major General Abdul Kalifa Ibrahim, declared Operation Lake Sanity a success.

Ibrahim said 3,000 troops from the participating nations launched the operation in late March to clear the Lake Chad basin of Islamist insurgents.

Speaking on Cameroon’s state broadcaster, CRTV, he said the task force had destroyed scores of houses and vehicles used by Boko Haram militants.

“We have cleared a lot of settlements” that Boko Haram had used before, including on islands in Lake Chad, “and so far over 800 of the Boko Haram criminals have been neutralized or killed in Operation Lake Sanity,” Ibrahim said.

Ibrahim said the task force had freed 4,500 people held captive by the insurgents, who killed five task force troops and wounded 20. He said the joint forces also had seized large quantities of ammunition and weapons, but he did not elaborate.

At Thursday’s meeting, the four militaries agreed to extend the operation for two more months.

Ibrahim said insurgents were hiding in communities around the Lake Chad basin, which stretches across the task force nations.

Plea for cooperation

“The population has been very good,” he said. “We are there to protect them. They should continue to cooperate with us; if they have information, they should pass it to us. When they see people who are strange in their neighborhoods, they should report to the nearest security official.”

Midjiyawa Bakari, governor of Cameroon’s Far North region, which borders Chad and Nigeria, said through a messaging application from the capital, Maroua, that during the operation they have been urging villagers to help them flush out the militants.

Bakari said he had personally embarked on an awareness-raising campaign in border towns and villages. He said he had spoken with clerics, chiefs, and community leaders and elites who feared payback from Boko Haram. Bakari said he’d told them to immediately distance themselves from terrorist groups, who are responsible for disorder and conflict in their areas.

Nigerian Islamists Boko Haram began launching attacks at home in 2009 before spreading to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. The Multinational Joint Task Force of the Lake Chad Basin Commission was created in 2014 to fight the militants and has about 11,000 troops and rescue workers.

The United Nations says the conflict has left more than 36,000 people dead, mainly in Nigeria, while 3 million have been forced to flee their homes.

Source: Voice of America

An internet rumor blazed through the country that desperate people were selling their toes for cash. The false report became so widespread that the country’s Deputy Minister of Information Kindness Paradza visited street vendors in central Harare earlier this month to debunk it.

One-by-one the traders took off their shoes to show that they had all 10 toes, as Zimbabwe’s state media recorded the digital investigation.

Paradza declared the toes-for-money story a hoax, as did local and foreign fact-checkers. Police later arrested a street vendor who now faces a fine or 6 months in jail on charges of criminal nuisance for allegedly starting the story.

It’s starkly true, however, that Zimbabweans are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. Since the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Zimbabwe’s inflation rate has shot up from 66% to more than 130%, according to official statistics. The war is blamed for rising fuel and food prices.

The war in Ukraine has exacerbated inflation around the world. Consumer prices in the 19 European Union countries that use the euro currency surged 8.1% in May, a record rate as energy and food costs climbed. In the U.S. and the United Kingdom, annual inflation hit or was close to 40-year highs of 8.3% and 9%, respectively, in April. Turkey approached Zimbabwe’s eye-watering prices, with inflation reaching 73.5% in May, the highest in 24 years.

In Zimbabwe, the impact of the Ukraine war is heaping problems on its fragile economy. The war “coupled with our historical domestic imbalances, has created challenges in terms of economic instability seen through the currency volatility and spilling over into price volatility,” Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube told Parliament in May.

Teachers “can no longer afford bread and other basics, this is too much,” tweeted the Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe in early June. The three largest teachers’ unions are demanding the government pay their salaries in U.S. dollars because their pay in local currency is “eroded overnight.”

“Because of high inflation, the local currency is collapsing,” economic analyst Prosper Chitambara told The Associated Press. “Individuals and companies no longer trust the local currency and that has put pressure on the demand for U.S. dollars. The Ukraine war is simply exacerbating an already difficult situation.”

Many fear Zimbabwe could return to the hyperinflation of 2008, which was estimated at 500 billion percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. At that time, plastic bags full of 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollar banknotes were not enough to buy basic groceries.

The economic catastrophe forced then-President Robert Mugabe to form a “unity government” with the opposition and adopt a multi-currency system in 2009 in which US dollars and the South African rand were accepted as legal tender.

The U.S. dollar continues to dominate with prices in local currency often benchmarked to the rates for the American currency on the flourishing illegal market, where most individuals and companies get their foreign currency.

Across the country, currency traders line the streets and crowd entrances to shopping centers waving wads of both the local currency and U.S dollars.

Many Zimbabweans who earn in local currency such as government workers are forced to source dollars on the illegal market, where exchange rates are soaring, to pay for goods and services that are increasingly being charged in U.S. dollars.

Retailers said the rising rates for U.S. dollars on the illegal market are forcing them to frequently increase prices, often every few days, to allow them to restock.

The once-prosperous southern African country’s economy is battered by years of de-industrialization, corruption, low investment, low exports and high debt. Zimbabwe struggles to generate an adequate inflow of greenbacks needed for its largely dollarized local economy.

Ordinary Zimbabweans are returning to coping mechanisms they relied on during the hyperinflationary era such as skipping meals. Others now buy food items in smaller quantities, sometimes in such tiny packages they are enough for just a single meal. Locals call them “tsaona,” meaning “accident” in the local Shona language.

Promising better days ahead, Ncube, the finance minister, said the government “will not hesitate to act and intervene to cushion against price increases and exchange rate volatility.”

Many are skeptical of such vows from the government, saying nothing short of a miracle will pull Zimbabwe out of its economic crisis. Even while coping with constantly rising prices, many can’t help making grim jokes about the situation.

“I still have all my toes intact but it wouldn’t hurt selling one,” chuckled Harare resident Asani Sibanda. “I could still walk without it, but my family would at least get some food.”

Source: Voice of America

U.S. health officials are working to expand capabilities to test for monkeypox beyond a narrow group of public health labs, heeding calls from infectious-disease experts who say testing for the virus needs to become part of routine care.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said during a conference call Friday that her agency was working with the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to expand testing capacity to include commercial laboratories.

The CDC did not respond to a request for details.

Currently, preliminary monkeypox testing in the United States is done through a network of 69 public health laboratories, which send results to the CDC for confirmation.

There have been 45 confirmed monkeypox cases in 16 U.S. states so far, with the bulk of the current outbreak outside Africa, where the virus is endemic, occurring in Europe.

The United States has conducted roughly 300 monkeypox tests. While testing for the virus rose by 45% last week, that needs to increase dramatically if the outbreak is to be contained, infectious-disease experts said.

“There is not enough testing going on now for monkeypox in the United States,” said Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“The commercial labs are used to working with health care providers from across the country, moving samples around quickly, reporting results quickly in a way that providers understand and expect,” he said.

For commercial labs to do this testing, they need access to monkeypox samples to validate their tests, regulatory guidance from the FDA and commercial billing codes set by CMS, said Inglesby, a former senior White House adviser for the COVID-19 response.

“My sense is all of that is moving forward,” he said.

In a detailed report of 17 cases published by the CDC last week, most patients identified as men who have sex with men.

In many of the cases, the monkeypox rash started in the genital area, which could lead some doctors to misdiagnose it as a more common sexually transmitted infection such as herpes or syphilis.

“Monkeypox symptoms are mimicking other sexually transmitted infections,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of Sexually Transmitted Disease Directors. “We need to mount a bigger national response.”

The Association of Public Health Laboratories said it has plenty of capacity now but will work to expand testing to commercial labs should the outbreak continue to grow.

Source: Voice of America