Day: September 15, 2022

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will meet U.S. President Joe Biden at the White House Friday, with trade, energy, and security all on the agenda. What’s not officially on the program, but will likely be discussed, analysts say, are the two democracies’ differences over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ramaphosa’s first visit to the White House comes as the Biden administration seeks to re-engage with Africa in the wake of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent visit to the continent, during which he launched Washington’s new Africa strategy.

During the trip in August, Blinken stressed that the U.S. sees Africa as an equal partner.

However, at their meeting in Pretoria, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor accused Western nations of “bullying” Africa in trying to get countries to condemn the invasion of Ukraine.

Bob Wekesa, director of the African Center for the Study of the United States at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand, said the differences between the two countries were evident at the two top diplomats’ talks.

“At that meeting it was very clear that South Africa and the U.S. were on different paths and trajectories as regards many issues,” he said.

Wekesa said Ukraine will likely come up again when Biden and Ramaphosa meet Friday and predicted the two leaders will have a “difficult” discussion on the issue.

“The U.S., having taken a very clear position on supporting Ukraine, to kind of eject Russian forces from Ukraine, will be lobbying South Africa quite hard to kind of change [its] tune,” he said.

South Africa abstained from a U.N. vote earlier this year to condemn Russia’s invasion. Afterward, Biden phoned Ramaphosa. A White House statement after the call said Biden had “emphasized the need for a clear, unified international response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.”

Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Program at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said Ramaphosa and Biden will discuss other issues as well, but added that the Ukraine topic cannot be avoided.

“On the agenda will be trade and investment, issues like climate change and food security, energy, peace and security in Africa, and of course what’s not officially on the agenda but will certainly be talked about is the war in Ukraine and the differing positions of South Africa and the U.S. on that particular conflict,” he said.

Gruzd said he thought the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, which passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and is now being considered by the Senate, would also come up in the two leaders’ conversation.

African countries see the act, which would sanction nations that trade with Russia, as an attempt to punish them for not voting with the U.S. on Ukraine.

In December, Biden is set to host the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington.

Source: Voice of America

Officials in Cameroon say armed separatists have chased several thousand children from schools just days after the students returned to classrooms for the first time in years. Troops sent to restore school security in the western regions say they have killed at least 13 rebels in clashes over the last month.

Cameroon’s military says separatist attacks this month on western villages, mostly on schools, sent thousands of schoolchildren, teachers and villagers fleeing for safety.

Lingalla Prudence is among students who on Monday fled Kumbo, an English-speaking town in the Northwest Region. The separatist conflict has disrupted her education so often that the 21-year-old, who should be in college, is still trying to finish high school.

“We were in school, and some people brought guns and chased us out of the school and kidnapped some teachers and all the children are out of school,” she said.

Teachers’ associations say the anglophone rebels are targeting state schools, which they view as a tool of the French-speaking majority’s rule. But they are also attacking religious and private schools.

Joe Tiemuncho, coordinator of the Parent-Teachers Association for Presbyterian schools in Cameroon, said separatist attacks and threats have shut down scores of schools that had reopened, some for the first time in years, when the school year started on September 5.

“Many schools have shut down given the intimidations that are coming from separatist fighters,” he said. “Teachers, learners and school managers are afraid to get into full-swing activities because it is unpredictable, you can’t say what will happen in the next few minutes. Some teachers have even had their arms amputated. Students have been kidnapped and they [fighters] continue to kidnap teachers, students and others asking for ransom.”

Cameroonian military spokespersons weren’t allowed to speak with reporters on a trip to the area, but they did confirm that hundreds of troops were deployed to restore security so classes can resume.

The military says the separatists also declared a lockdown in the English-speaking western regions that paralyzed trade. Separatists that declared the lockdown say it is in response to a government ban on community schools that the rebels control.

Capo Daniel, a self-declared deputy defense chief of the Ambazonia Defense Forces (ADF), one of the largest rebel groups in Cameroon, said the ADF is not in favor of the lockdown called by other rebel factions.

“Misguided forces that are imposing this lockdown target [on] innocent civilians who have largely rejected this lockdown. So, for the most part, our people stay at home out of fear,” he said. “It is the responsibility of everybody who speaks for the Ambazonia liberation movement to ensure our students access community schools, religious schools and private schools that have been allowed and authorized by us to open.”

Cameroon in August closed more than 200 community schools that rebels said they controlled.

The military says in the past week troops killed at least 13 rebels during clashes in the towns of Kumbo, Oku and Ndop.

Rebel spokesman Daniel confirmed their fighters were killed and said they also killed government troops.

Cameroon’s military did not confirm any fatalities but said a few troops were wounded.

Cameroon’s anglophone rebels want to create a breakaway state they call Ambazonia, separate from Cameroon’s French-speaking majority. The U.N. says the rebel conflict has killed more than 3,300 people and displaced more than a half-million since fighting broke out in 2017.

Source: Voice of America

Nigeria is facing a record reduction in oil production, oil cartel OPEC reports, dropping from the first largest producer in Africa to the fourth, behind Angola, Algeria and Libya.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries monthly oil market report for August showed that Nigeria’s production stood at 980,000 barrels a day, a decline of more than 100,000 barrels per day compared to July.

The figure was about 50% of OPEC’s target for the west African nation in August.

For decades, Nigeria has been Africa’s largest oil producer. But in recent years, theft and sabotage at production sites have hampered output. Petroleum authorities say more than 200,000 barrels are lost daily as a result, and that the trend is costing the country millions of dollars in revenue.

Oil was once Nigeria’s biggest earner and contributor to national GDP, but the latest data shows information and communications technology and trade contributed more during the second quarter this year.

Abuja-based oil and gas expert, Emmanuel Afimia, said he’s worried about Nigeria’s current situation.

“At this particular point in time when the oil prices are rising, Nigeria is supposed to sit back and be enjoying revenue and inflows of forex [foreign exchange trading] through the sales and export of crude oil. But the reverse is the case, so it’s really a negative thing for the country falling from that position of being the biggest producer, Nigeria will slowly be losing its influence in the global oil market,” Afimia said.

Nigerian authorities also are raising concerns. Last Friday, President Muhammadu Buhari said the situation was putting the economy in a precarious situation.

And earlier this week, Nigerian lawmakers sent a delegation to oil-rich Rivers State to investigate the problem and report back their findings to the Senate.

But oil and gas expert Faith Nwadishi said authorities must share the blame, too.

“It’s a question of pointing one finger when four fingers are pointing back at you,” Nwadishi said. “If government was doing enough, I don’t think that we’ll close our eyes and see our major source of revenue being stolen up to 90 percent. I want to see a situation where government is taking more action than crying out.”

Petroleum authorities and security operatives have been working to halt the oil theft.

Raids in late August led to the arrest of more than 100 oil thieves and the recovery of millions of liters of crude oil and diesel.

Mele Kyari, head of the National Nigeria Petroleum Company, said the clampdown is making progress.

“What is most difficult to manage today and daring for us to live with is the issue of crude oil theft, [but] we’re not helpless and our efforts are paying off,” Kyari said.

Authorities in August awarded a pipeline surveillance contract to a former militant who once stole oil and vandalized pipelines. The move was criticized by citizens, but officials say the former militant’s expertise will help prevent theft.

Source: Voice of America

In one of his first acts in office, Kenya’s new president, William Ruto, ordered cargo containers from incoming ships to be emptied at the port of Mombasa instead of in the capital, Nairobi. Ruto said he is carrying out a campaign promise, though there are concerns the move could overwhelm facilities at the Mombasa port.

In 2019, the Kenyan government shifted cargo clearance operations from Kenya’s Indian Ocean port of Mombasa to the inland cities of Nairobi and Naivasha.

This week, Ruto directed that the operations be returned to Mombasa.

“I will be issuing instructions for clearing of goods and other attended operational issues to revert to the port of Mombasa as I made a commitment to Kenyans,” Ruto said. “This will restore thousands of jobs in the city of Mombasa.”

Former President Uhuru Kenyatta had moved cargo clearance to Nairobi to increase use of the Standard Gauge Railway, which was built with a $4.5 billion loan from China. The move forced companies to pay transport fees to use the railway — a decision Kenyan officials saw as the best way to repay the loan.

Ruto’s decision, announced Tuesday, is welcomed by newly-elected Mombasa governor Abdulswamad Shariff Nassir, who said the need to repay the debt is not reason to kill business at his city’s port.

“We have been fighting for it for a long time and we said openly, even if it was to repay the SGR debt, there are other ways to repay it. It’s not a must to kill the economy of one part of the country.”

According to the Economic Survey of 2022, SGR usage increased by 22.6 percent in 2021 and made $108 million, up from $87 million in 2020. The increase is attributed to cargo shipments to Nairobi.

With cargo clearance operations shifting back to Mombasa, many people are concerned that the railway will lose business to trucking companies, making it difficult for the railway to pay its debt, and ultimately shifting the cost of its construction to taxpayers.

Some traders argued that historically the Mombasa port has been slow to unload and transport cargo containers.

Gerrishon Ikiara, an economics teacher at the University of Nairobi, predicts the Mombasa port will not be able to handle the increased responsibilities.

“Very shortly, we will start getting the impact of the delayed cargo and other inconveniences, overcrowding of Mombasa highway and corruption in the police office at every point.”

Governance and urban development expert Alfred Omenya is hopeful the problems can be overcome, if the government appoints good managers to run the port.

“I think the president did the right thing,” he said. “We hope that it’s not an ad hoc political action, but it will be an action that will be based on coherent planning, coherent strategy and coherent development of our country.”

In a worst-case scenario, congestion and corruption at the Mombasa port will make traders from neighboring countries flock to other ports, making Kenya lose much-needed revenue for developing and servicing its debt.

Source: Voice of America

Despite lingering doubts about the usefulness of so-called decapitation strikes, U.S. operations to kill senior terrorist leaders are paying dividends, according to one of Washington’s top counterterrorism officials.

Both the Islamic State terror group and al-Qaida have been forced to stay in “survival mode” following the deaths of their leaders as a result of U.S. actions this year, National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid said Thursday.

Islamic State, in particular, she said, has been forced to refocus following the death of former emir Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, also known as Hajji Abdallah, following a U.S. special forces raid in northwestern Syria in February.

At the time, senior U.S. military officials described Abu Ibrahim’s death as a “significant blow,” an assessment that has been borne out in the way IS has carried out operations in recent months.

“What’s important about it is it’s not just him,” Abizaid told an intelligence and security conference outside Washington, responding to a question submitted by VOA.

“It’s that he is the last in a long line of leaders who are no longer trying to attack the United States and trying to rout Syria and regain territorial control in a way that, I think, has really reflected a major talent loss in ISIS senior leadership,” Abizaid said, using another acronym for the terror group. “[It] has caused them to focus on kind of branch expansion that has diffused the threat and, again, made the focus on the United States less acute than we had seen in prior years.”

The U.S. airstrike that killed longtime al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri at the end of July has, likewise, resulted in a cascading effect on the terror organization.

“I think about now how important it was not just for the threat that he posed, but for the tie that he created across the al-Qaida network,” Abizaid said. “That tie is weaker today because he’s not on the battlefield.

“And the weaker and the more diffuse that al-Qaida network is, I think, the better for U.S. national security,” she added.

Abizaid’s assessment seems to reflect a shift in U.S. thinking, especially when it comes to Islamic State.

For years, even in the aftermath of the collapse of Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, U.S. and Western military and counterterrorism officials warned that IS and its key affiliates had structured themselves in such a way that for every key leader who was killed, there was an understudy ready to take his place.

And a recently declassified intelligence assessment written in May 2020 predicted IS was “organizing for a prolonged insurgency while rebuilding many key capabilities that are likely to expand its global reach and the threat it poses to U.S. and Western interests.”

But recent intelligence estimates suggest IS’s hold among its followers in Iraq and Syria may be waning.

While there are still areas that serve as key communication and financial hubs, like the al-Hol displaced persons camp in northeast Syria, the terror group’s fighters have been dispersed across remote areas. And its cadre of fighters, numbering as many as 16,000 last year is now estimated to be fewer than 10,000.

The U.S. and its allies have also pointed to a series of operations following the raid on Abu Ibrahim that have whittled away at IS’s core leadership, including U.S. drone strikes and the arrests of senior IS leaders in Syria and Turkey.

A recent report by the United Nations, based on member state intelligence, went as far as to caution that al-Qaida was poised to surpass IS as the world’s preeminent jihadist terrorist organization, due in part to “a rapid succession of [IS] leadership losses since October 2019, with an as yet unknown impact on its operational health.”

Meanwhile, there are growing questions about the ability of the al-Qaida core to remain relevant and influential with al-Zawahiri gone.

“This is challenging for al-Qaida,” a former Western counterterrorism official told VOA following al-Zawahiri’s death, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss recent intelligence assessments.

Those assessments from the U.S., as well as those from several other countries that were shared with the United Nations, caution there are perhaps only a handful of al-Qaida core officials still in Afghanistan, long the group’s base of operations.

Al-Zawahiri’s likely successor, Saif al-Adel, meanwhile, is believed to be in Iran along with the next most senior al-Qaida official, and there are questions as to whether Tehran will let them leave.

Al-Qaida’s other top leaders are based in Africa, and intelligence officials say they may be more interested in the fortunes of their particular affiliates than in the broader concerns of the terror group.

Source: Voice of America