African leaders were very close to officially demanding President Donald Trump publicly apologize for reportedly crude remarks about the continent and immigration, but backed off, reports say.

The African Union drafted its response to the president at a summit this week.

The draft warned that Trump’s “racist and xenophobic behavior” puts the strategic partnership between the United States and Africa at risk.

It says African heads of state are “appalled” by the presidents’ apparent remarks and “dismayed and shocked by the increasingly consistent trend from the Trump administration to denigrate people of African descent and other people of color.” 

But the African Union decided not to release the draft. It pointed to a Jan. 25th letter from Trump in which he pledged his “deep respect” for Africa and announced that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will make an “extended visit” to Africa in March.

Trump also met with Rwandan President Paul Kagame on the sidelines of the Davos economic forum last week.

Kagame is the current chair of the African Union. He says the AU will have to find a way to get along with Trump.

“When the United States decided to give us Trump as their president, we will deal with that president,” Kagame said.

Trump reportedly called Africa, Haiti, and El Salvador “s—hole countries” during a White House meeting on immigration earlier this month, and wanted to exclude Haiti from any immigration reform deal.

He denied using such crude language.
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Calm has returned to the city of Saint-Louis in northern Senegal, following violent protests and the looting of shops belonging to Mauritanian nationals on Monday.

The violence erupted after the death of a Senegalese fisherman, shot by members of the Mauritanian coast guard. The Senegalese government condemned the killing but called on protesters to stay calm, promising to address the issue with Mauritanian officials.

Since the non-renewal of a fishing agreement between the two West African countries in 2016, incidents involving Senegalese fishermen and the Mauritanian coast guard have been frequent. Moustapha Dieng, the secretary-general of the Senegalese union of artisanal fishermen, said this is not an isolated incident.

“This is the fourth incident in which fishermen have been shot dead. And there are others who have been injured and will never be able to fish again.”

In a written statement, the Mauritanian military said that “the unfortunate event” occurred because of “the provocative behavior of the fishermen who ignored the orders of the coast guard.” They said the coast guard members shot at the engine in an attempt to disable the canoe, but one of the nine fishermen was hit by a bullet. The statement added that coast guard vessels conducted 62 similar operations last year without incident.

In Mauritania, the issue is being discussed widely in both traditional and social media. Mohamed Diop, editor of the Alakhbar newspaper, said the issue is attracting a lot of attention.

“The Mauritanian media are very interested in the issue because the two heads of state have been informed and discussed it on the sidelines of the African Union Summit in Addis Ababa,” he said. “The Senegalese interior minister has said the two presidents decided to address the issue at the highest level to avoid a rift.”

Moustapha Dieng said his union members feel that the Senegal government is not taking the issue seriously.

“When [authorities] board a canoe involved in unlawful fishing, they are allowed by law to confiscate the material, but you have to let the fishermen go. We also want our government to send patrols to the border, just like Mauritania is doing.”

In Mauritania, many residents have denounced the destruction and looting of shops belonging to Mauritanians in Saint-Louis, but most seem to strike a conciliatory tone.

“There is a real attempt to appease the tension, and we can see it because today there was no looting reported in Senegal. And here, the media have been very conciliatory, except a few that are favoring the Mauritanian position in their coverage,” Diop said.

The fishermen’s union in Senegal is hoping discussions between the two governments will resume soon on a new fishing agreement. That would allow its members to conduct their activities in both countries’ territorial waters without fear, in exchange for an annual fee.

The two nations are seeking to avoid an escalation in tensions as they discuss another hot-button issue. Dakar and Nouakchott are hoping to partner to exploit an underwater natural gas field recently discovered at their common maritime border. The two countries severed ties in 1989 following violent incidents and mass repatriation of each other’s citizens. Diplomatic relations have since been restored.
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In a rare interview, Eritrea’s president has expressed his displeasure with Israel’s plan to deport tens of thousands of African migrants, saying they deserve far more than the $3,500 they were offered to leave.

President Isaias Afwerki’s interview on a government website Wednesday said the migrants from his country and Sudan paid a “high price” to human traffickers to reach Israel and deserve more like $50,000.

“They need fair compensation to start a new life in their home country,” Afwerki said in the interview with local reporters. He said all those who wish to return home “have every right to do so,” and that Eritrea has offered to register all of its roughly 20,000 migrants but Israeli authorities had refused.

Many Eritreans leaving the east African nation claim they fled a restrictive regime under Afwerki, where men are often forced into a military service with slavery-like conditions. They say they cannot return.

In the interview, Afwerki claimed instead that the Eritrean migrants were enticed abroad to organize an armed opposition but that the “subversive schemes” failed and the migrants now have become a burden.

Israel’s deportation plan has sparked protests by liberal Israelis who say the country should never turn away those in need. They note that of 15,000 African refugee status requests, only 11 have been approved.

On April 1, Israel plans to start expelling the African migrants, some of whom have been in the country for years. About 60,000 migrants crossed Israel’s previously porous desert border with Egypt before a barrier was completed in 2012 along the 130-mile (220-kilometer) frontier.

Since then about 20,000 migrants have left either voluntarily, via a U.N. program, or with the encouragement of the Israeli government, which offers each about $3,500 and a plane ticket to leave. Others have been locked up in a massive detention center in the remote southern desert.

Israel’s Cabinet recently voted to begin shipping out the remaining 40,000 migrants, even against their will, to an unnamed third African country with which it has reached a secret agreement. 

Israeli authorities said the migrants would be deported to Rwanda and Uganda, Afwerki said. 

“We are told they will be deported to any country that can accept them,” he said. “These are human beings, not livestock. No country can claim legal responsibility to receive our citizens.”
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Jobless, restless and frustrated, 24-year-old Saikou Jammeh persuaded his father to sell the family home and give up his life savings to pay for the journey from Gambia to Europe.

Jammeh saw no future for himself in Gambia, a tiny impoverished country on West Africa’s coast, so he joined an exodus of young men willing to sacrifice everything to leave.

But after being robbed, beaten, and locked in a Libyan prison for several months, Jammeh found himself back where he started — in Gambia with no job prospects and empty pockets.

“I felt abandoned by the government,” he said on a busy street in Churchill’s Town, a suburb of the capital Banjul. “I was just sitting, wondering what to do.”

Thousands of thwarted migrants like Jammeh are returning to Gambia, straining its fledgling government as officials scramble to get European-funded reintegration projects up and running.

President Adama Barrow took office a year ago, ending former leader Yahya Jammeh’s 22 years of autocratic rule, and is under pressure to deliver on promises of sweeping economic reforms.

Nearly 2,500 Gambians were flown home by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) last year, most pulled out of prisons in Libya after reports emerged of Africans being sold in slave markets in the lawless country, the U.N. agency said.

The returnees are a noticeable presence in the nation of 2 million, posing a bigger threat to stability than in other West African countries wrestling with migration, experts said.

“We are not ready to receive all these people,” said Bulli Dibba, permanent secretary of Gambia’s interior ministry.

“We are very much concerned for domestic security,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

In November, a group of newly-returned migrants threw rocks at the IOM offices because they were unhappy with the support they had received, according to IOM spokeswoman Florence Kim.

“The government is already struggling to deal with unemployment,” added Dibba, a veteran Gambian civil servant. “If we have more people coming in, what will we do with them?”

Out of reach

Gambians have accounted for about one in 20 migrants arriving in Italy in recent years, making it the country with the highest number of migrants per capita reaching Europe.

Trying to stem the flow, the European Union is funding job training and youth empowerment programs across the continent with its 3.2 billion euro ($4 billion) Trust Fund for Africa.

While the fund was created in 2015, most of the programs in Gambia only started last year, according to the IOM.

“Thank god my life has grown into a plan,” said Saikou Jammeh, who did an EU-funded CCTV installation course after returning, and is now saving money for school.

But many young Gambians are missing out.

Of the 2,435 migrants who returned to Gambia in 2017, only 170 so far have received reintegration packages from the IOM, which consist of funding for education or business start-ups. The agency has received complaints, and is striving to avoid tensions and divisions within communities, said Kim of the IOM.

Give one former migrant more money than their peers and you create competition, she said. Offer returnees more support than their neighbors and it could spur others to leave for Europe.

Many of the returned migrants are traumatized, illiterate, or live in remote areas — making them difficult to assist.

“I know people who have ideas, but they don’t have any help,” said Donald Greywoode, 36, who quit his office job and set off for Europe on a route known locally as “the back way.”

 

When Greywoode came back, he found himself collecting trash.

Without education, training or job opportunities, boredom and resentment could boil over into conflict, analysts said.

“The stakes are very, very high,” said Franzisca Zanker, a researcher at Germany’s University of Freiburg, who has studied migration governance in Gambia.

Undettered

Several returnees told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that they had not wanted to come home, but having been locked up, abused and starved in Libya, were left with no other choice.

“We don’t see ourselves as voluntary returnees,” said Mustapha Sallah, 26, who came back from Libya in April.

“They said if you don’t want to go home, you die here,” Sallah said. “Leaving was the only option.”

Coupled with the lack of opportunity, such frustration could drive people to migrate once more, experts warned. Others said broader economic changes would be needed to keep youth at home.

“Even after training all these people in all these skills, if the industry is not there, they will still struggle,” said Kebba Sillah, head of Sterling Consortium, a vocational training institute supported by the EU Trust Fund for Africa.

“I think the EU needs to encourage their businesses to come set up here, not just pump in money,” Sillah added.

While many returnees said they would never again attempt the treacherous journey through Libya, some still dream of Europe.

Jerreh Cham, 22, has received EU funding to complete a satellite installation course and attend business management school since returning from Libya in August.

But it is not enough to keep him at home.

“My plan is to get my qualification before reaching Europe,” said Cham, sitting in the yard outside his family’s small home. “If I go with my qualification and everything, I don’t think anybody will discount me. I think they will give me my respect.”

 
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In Kenya, independent local broadcasters say the government orchestrated a media blackout Tuesday to prevent live TV coverage of opposition leader Raila Odinga swearing himself in as the so-called “people’s president.” 

Citizen TV was one of three major stations to go off the air in Kenya Tuesday. Citizen TV had announced that it would be broadcasting live from the site of the opposition’s rival presidential inauguration. 

In an interview with VOA, Wachira Waruru, the head of Royal Media Services, which owns Citizen TV and dozens of radio stations in Kenya, said the government was behind the shutdown.

“Officials from Communication Authority accompanied by police officers went to our transmission station in Limuru, and they disabled our transmission. So we have been off air since.”

Officials at the Communication Authority of Kenya declined to comment when reached by VOA.

 Also taken off air Tuesday were Nation Television and Kenya Television Network. Both had planned live coverage of Odinga’s swearing-in event.

Waruru said they did not see this coming.

“We were shocked and disappointed because we don’t believe there is anything we have done to warrant a shutdown. So we are very shocked and disappointed that this can happen with no explanation of any kind,” Waruru said.

Citizen TV and the others were able to live stream coverage Tuesday through the internet.

Speaking to the Kenya Television Network, Odinga condemned what he called an attack on the media.

“This is very unfortunate. Indeed it basically confirms that we have descended to the level of Uganda where in the last general elections all TV stations were shut off including also the social media network. We did not expect this will come to our country. It’s very unfortunate indeed, and it must be condemned by all civilized mankind,” Odinga said. 
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A new political dawn in Zimbabwe has sparked talk among farmers of land reform and the return of some whites who lost their land and livelihoods to President Robert Mugabe during a 37-year rule that drove the economy to collapse.

Mugabe, 93, resigned in November after the army and his ZANU-PF party turned against him, prompting optimism among some of the thousands of white farmers ousted in the early 2000s on the grounds of redressing imbalances from the colonial era.

For colonialists seized some of the best agricultural land that remained in the hands of white farmers after independence in 1980 leaving many blacks effectively landless and making land ownership one of Zimbabwe’s most sensitive political topics.

Now some white landowners hope the post-Mugabe regime may address the land issue, either through compensation or returning land, and try to resuscitate a once vibrant agricultural sector boosting an economy once seen as one of Africa’s great hopes.

“We are convinced positive signals will come quickly in terms of property rights,” Ben Purcel Gilpin, director of the Commercial Farmers Union (CFU), which represents white and black farmers, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It would send a good signal to people outside Zimbabwe.” 

New president and long-time Mugabe ally, Emmerson Mnangagwa, has promised a raft of changes since he took office, including a return to the rule of law and respect for property rights.

Land ownership has been a key issue for decades in Zimbabwe dating back to British colonial rule in what was then Rhodesia.

At independence, white farmers owned more than 70 percent of the most fertile land and generated 80 percent of the country’s agricultural output, according to academics.

Reforms began after independence with a “willing buyer, willing seller” system aimed at redistributing land to poor black subsistence farmers. In the 1990s, compulsory acquisition of land began with some funding provided by Britain.

But for many Zimbabweans change was too slow and Mugabe approved radical land reforms that encouraged occupation of some 4,000 white-owned farms. Land went to his supporters with no knowledge of farming and thousands of white farmers fled.

The violent farm seizures saw Zimbabwe forfeit its status as the bread basket of Africa and led to a collapse of many industries that depended on agriculture. Among those were paper mills, textile firms, leather tanners and clothing companies.

As a result the country failed to generate foreign currency, resulting in the central bank printing money which led to unprecedented levels of hyper-inflation and high unemployment.

New start

Now some white farmers are starting to reclaim their land.

“White commercial farmers, like all other Zimbabweans, could apply for land from the Government and join the queue or go into joint ventures,” Mnangagwa told a former white commercial farmer during a recent visit to Namibia.

The CFU’s Gilpin – who quit farming and moved to Harare after his farm was compulsorily acquired by the government in 2005 – said sound policies from the new team could win support and help the economy.

He said compensation rather than putting people back into their properties might be the best route as many farmers are now too old to farm, some had died and others migrated.

The current situation – where resettled farmers had 99-year leases – was also untenable as the leases were not accepted by banks as collateral against borrowing.

Gilpin said this effectively made the land dead capital, as banks could not sell if farmers failed to pay back loans, so the government should instead offer farmers freehold titles.

Property rights expert Lloyd Mhishi, a senior partner in the law firm Mhishi Nkomo Legal Practice, said although Mnangagwa spoke about compensating farmers whose land was expropriated, he did not give specifics and title deeds of the former white farmers had no legal force after repossession.

Political way out

“As far as the law of the country is concerned, the title deeds that the former white commercial farmers hold do not guarantee them title,” Mhishi said in an interview.

But the lawyer said there were positive signs that the new administration realised land was a vital cog in the economy.

“I see there will be an attempt to make land useful, productive,” he said. “The land tenure side needs to be addressed to make land useful.”

Independent economist John Robertson, a former Advisor to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, said, however, that any idea of compensation should be dropped and former white commercial farmers should get back to their land and resume work.

“I’d rather see them get back their land and start farming again than paid out and emigrating. We need their skills. If people who oppose that idea could be just successful, where have they been for the past 20 years?” he said.
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The ratio of South Sudanese refugees to local residents in the Arua district is now 1 to 4, according to the U.N. refugee agency. That puts nearly a quarter-million refugees in that district alone. 

At the vast Imvempi settlement, a refugee named Susan, 23, digs the foundation for her new home using her bare hands and a metal bar. 

Her baby cries nearby. Susan has had to dig 16 holes, each 60 centimeters long, in which to insert the logs.

“But, problem of house, is problem for me,” she says. “The stone is very more; this one I suffer, nobody to help me.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi visited the settlement Tuesday, talking to new arrivals like Susan. She told of how her brother had been killed by rebels, leaving her to care for his three children in addition to her own. 

‘Please make peace’

Grandi made this appeal to the warring factions in South Sudan:

“Please make peace. We can’t subject these people once again to exile, to suffering. We can’t always take for granted the generosity of the Ugandan people. Really, we must ensure that peace comes, because everybody told me this morning, as in the past, ‘If there is peace I will go back, because this is where I belong. It’s my country.’ ”

Uganda is currently hosting 1.3 million refugees, nearly all of them from South Sudan. 

The civil war started in 2013, and a 2015 peace deal quickly disintegrated. International monitors say a cease-fire signed in December was also violated in short order. 

Serina Alex, 19, lives at Imvempi settlement. She has had no word on her seven family members since she fled her hometown of Yei.

“So many people are losing life in South Sudan — brothers and sisters, mothers and our fathers,” she said. “They are losing lives in South Sudan because of the war. But I request the president of South Sudan that they could cool down and bring peace to South Sudan.”

Grandi’s visit to Uganda came ahead of a fresh funding appeal to be announced Thursday to meet the needs of more than 2.2 million displaced South Sudanese in 2018. Many of the displaced are children.
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