This year, Malians will vote in nationwide elections amid discontent over continued insecurity and poverty. Popular anger has found a focal point in a diminutive figure who goes by the name of Ras Bath. Without running for office himself, Ras Bath is an influential figure to watch.

Mohamed Youssouf Bathily, who everybody calls Ras Bath, addresses a rally in Mali’s second city, Sikasso.

With jokes and anecdotes, he paints a picture of how he says Mali’s ruling class holds on to power and perks. Mali’s elites don’t like it one bit — but the people can’t get enough of his speeches.

So how did the son of a government minister become the voice of the poor?

The answer to that question lies next door in Senegal.

Ras Bath went to Dakar in 2010 for law school. He met the Senegalese rapper Fadel Barro, who was about to start a popular movement against that would usher then-president Aboulaye Wade to defeat in the 2012 elections. This became “Y’en a marre,” or “We’re fed up.”

“Y’en a marre” went on to inspire Balai Citoyen in Burkina Faso, which helped chase away that country’s long-time ruling elite in 2014. Is Mali next? Yes, says Ras Bath.

“We have tried everything,” he said. “We had empires, we had colonialism, and then we had one-party rule and military rule. We have chosen true democracy, with freedom of conscience, freedom of opinion, freedom to form associations and political parties. But this democracy has been hollowed out. We need to shake things up for it to get better.”

He set up a citizen’s movement called Collective for the Defense of the Republic, or CDR, in 2013. CDR organizes the mass rallies where he speaks.

He also started a radio program, “Cards On The Table,” in 2014.

Live on air, Ras Bath discusses the problems of ordinary Malians, exposes corruption scandals and calls on government ministers to resign. Unheard of in a country where politeness could be said to be part of the national DNA.

And indeed, his critics say that he is too abrasive, too confrontational. As the local saying goes: “Tell the truth — but do it gently.”

Ras Bath was arrested in August 2016, a move that provoked violent riots in Bamako. The charge was inciting the army to disobey orders. The Court of Appeal threw out the charge in November of last year.

The activist remains unapologetic.

He says his slogan is “choquer pour eduquer” (“shock, in order to educate”). Ras Bath wants Malians to change their thinking about government.

“Through our taxes, we pay the police to protect our homes, we pay our representatives to keep an eye on the government and we pay the president to rule for the good of us all,” he said. “Judges, lawmakers, presidents are not your masters; they are here to serve you.”

He says these are new ideas in Mali, where authority is revered and rarely questioned.

Few expect a major upset in the upcoming elections. However President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita is criticized for not doing enough to remove armed terrorist groups from the country and to root out the corruption and bad governance that plunged Mali into crisis in 2012.

Malians have taken to the streets to express their discontent, last summer forcing President Keita to abandon efforts to change Mali’s constitution. In the last two months, it was violence against women that brought people out on the streets in protest.

Civic activism is expected to play a major role in elections this year.

A new song, by the up and coming protest singer Soldat, or Soldier, features Ras Bath’s famous slogan: “bua ka bla.” It means: “take a rest.” A clear message to President Keita, who at 72 seeks re-election.

 
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The charity Doctors Without Borders says hundreds of thousands of people displaced in remote areas of Borno State in northeastern Nigeria by the Boko Haram insurgency are totally dependent on external aid for survival.

Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French acronym, MSF, describes the living conditions of hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people in Borno State as dire.

While the Nigerian military has largely suppressed the Boko Haram insurgency that began in 2009, the crisis continues. Francois Tillette de Mautort, the MSF emergency humanitarian affairs officer in Switzerland, says these people are trapped in different enclaves in remote, hard to reach areas — some for more than two years.

He tells VOA they have very little freedom of movement because of security reasons. He says they have little hope of returning home any time soon and are totally reliant on international aid, which makes them extremely vulnerable.

“So, they do not have access to lands to farm,” he said. “They have very little access for their cattle to be able to graze outside of the IDP locations. This is part of the problems that we see. They are extremely reliant on assistance and on aid and they are very, very dependent, which also puts most of them in a very vulnerable situation.”

The Boko Haram conflict has displaced 1.7 million people, most in Borno State.Another 200,000 Nigerians have taken refuge in neighboring states.

President of MSF Switzerland, Reveka Papadopoulou, has just returned from a three-week visit to Borno State. She tells VOA food, safe water, medicine and other basic needs of the displaced are not being met.

“Stepping up the assistance both by the external or the international assistance, but also from the Nigerian State,” she said. “… In very few locations is there presence of the Nigerian administration. …The military is extremely present, but not the rest of the State services.”

MSF officials say it is important that the crisis in Borno State is not forgotten, adding that people who have been so cruelly victimized by Boko Haram must not continue to be victimized by national and international neglect.
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Political parties in Cameroon have set an ambitious goal ahead of this year’s polls — to put women in at least 30 percent of elected offices.

An all-female orchestra plays as 300 women selected from associations around Cameroon campaign in markets, universities and popular spots in the capital, asking women to register to vote.

Twenty-nine-year-old fish seller Clarisse Kongnyuy says she agreed to register because the women convinced her that with hard work, she might even one day be on the ballot.

“We can be able to do what a man can do, to be given posts that the world thinks that is only for men,” she said. “There are women who are mechanics. There are women who are driving Caterpillars and all the like, but at first they thought that that was just the job of a man. The problem is that some of the women are not pushful. They are like sleeping.”

Cameroon will be having a series of important elections this year — local, parliamentary and presidential.

Political parties, including the main opposition SDF and the ruling CPDM, have taken public commitments to achieve a U.N.-established benchmark of at least 30 percent female representation. The government has echoed that commitment, calling on parties to put forth an adequate number of female candidates.

The first election of the year is the senatorial, scheduled for March 25.

To meet the gender goal, women would need to win at least 20 of the 70 senatorial seats up for grabs, while President Paul Biya would have to include women among the 30 senators that the constitution calls on him to appoint.

Observers say the odds of success are long, at least in the short term.

Cameroon has 386 mayors. Just 26 are women. In the National Assembly, women occupy one-third of the seats in the lower house, while the upper house is just 20 percent women.

Female members of the ruling CPDM party say women should not to be discouraged.

Senator Julienne Djakaou of Cameroon’s Far North region says many women are not able to participate in decision-making because of traditional misconceptions and early marriage, which derails their education.

She said she did not believe it when men in her community said the Bible prohibits women from participating in politics, and so she went to seek advice from the highest member of the Roman Catholic Church in Cameroon, Cardinal Christian Tumi. She said  he told her that politics was for both men and women.

But some male politicians argue women aren’t ready and that Cameroon needs to get more women to vote before it can get more women in office.

Women constitute 52 percent of the country’s population. Yet, according to official figures, women account for just 30 percent of the seven million people registered to vote in this year’s polls.
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Through medication and narcotics smuggling, ivory and people trafficking, oil theft and piracy, Africa is, by conservative estimates, losing about $50 billion a year in illicit financial flows — more, in fact, than it receives in official development assistance. 

A report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development offers a bigger look at the illegal economy behind the losses and how African and richer nations can fight it.

The OECD report zooms in on West Africa, and one sector in particular stands out. Catherine Anderson, who heads governance issues as the OECD, said 80 percent of illicit financial flows from West Africa are generated from the theft of natural resouces, principally oil.

But West African countries aren’t the only ones losing out from illicit flows, Anderson said. So are developed nations. Migrant trafficking, a hot-button issue in Europe, is a case in point.

“One of our case studies is on al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is benefiting from the kidnap-for-ransom activities,” she said. “They are interdicting the trade and passage of goods across the Sahel, levying protection fees and revenues from the population. These have significant implications, not just for West African populations but for OECD countries, for Europe, in terms of insecurity and instability.”

She said illegal resource flows need to be tackled holistically — not only by the countries of origin, but also by those where the finances are transiting, and those where they finally end up, including developed countries. Doing so can be particularly tricky in West Africa, where a huge informal economy blurs the boundary of what is legal and what isn’t.

Ambassador Según Apata of Nigeria is a member of a U.N. high-level panel looking into illicit financial flows from Africa. He said some African governments are beginning to tackle the problem, but they don’t always have the capacity to do so.

“We have not made giant strides yet,” Apata said. “We are still at the elementary, at the mundane level of implementation.”

Apata said that if the $50 billion in losses from illegal activities were channeled into development in West Africa, it could help check the illegal migration that European countries worry about.
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When Markus Rohner flew into Cape Town’s airport this month, he found an unexpected line at the men’s washroom.

With the city facing an unprecedented water shortage, airport authorities had turned off all the sink taps but one, leaving visitors to wait in line to wash their hands, under the watchful eye of a bathroom attendant.

“In Johannesburg, there were a lot of jokes about the situation. People were saying to each other: ‘Let’s go to Cape Town for a dirty weekend,'” said Rohner, who visited both cities recently for his job as a sales and marketing director for a Swiss machinery manufacturer.

Cape Town, which is battling to keep its taps flowing as reservoirs run close to dry following a three-year drought, declared a national disaster this month. Without rain, Cape Town could run out of water by July 9, city authorities predict.

For visitors thinking of flying into one of the world’s tourism hotspots, threats of a water “Day Zero” raise a range of questions: Will a visit waste scarce water local people need? Will I be able to flush my hotel toilet and have a shower? Should I come at all?

Sisa Ntshona, who heads the tourism marketing arm of South Africa’s government, has the answer you’d expect: Tourists — who support an estimated 300,000 jobs in South Africa’s Western Cape province — should come but they should be prepared to help out and “Save like a local,” as the slogan goes.

In a city where residents now are expected to use no more than 50 liters of water a day — enough to drink, have a 90-second shower, flush the toilet at least once and wash a few clothes or dishes — tourists “don’t have special privileges,” he said.

That means no baths, swimming pools now sporting salt water instead of fresh, sheets and towels changed less regularly, and signs urging visitors to flush toilets as infrequently as possible.

At one Cape Town hotel, visitors who insist on a bath — which takes 80 liters of water — now have to conspicuously carry a large rubber duck placed in their bathtub to reception to exchange it for a bath plug.

With climate change expected to bring worsening water shortages to cities around the world — from Sao Paulo to Los Angeles to Jakarta — such changes are going to be needed in many places in years to come, said Ntshona, the CEO of South African Tourism.

“How do we recalibrate the norm for global tourism?” he asked, on a visit to London to reassure potential visitors. “Tourists are aware of recycling, carbon emissions. But now it’s water.”

“This is the new norm,” he said. “Even if it rains tomorrow, we can never go back to the old way of consuming water.”

Tourist cash

For Cape Town, keeping tourists flowing through the city is an urgent priority.

Foreign tourists represent only about 1 percent of the people in the city even at peak times, but tourism — foreign and South African — contributes $3.4 billion to the province’s economy each year, said Ravi Nadasen, deputy chair of the Tourism Business Council of South Africa.

Any tourism drop-off in Cape Town also hits the rest of the country, Ntshona said. With many visitors booking itineraries that start in Cape Town and move east, he said, a loss of visitors to Table Mountain also means fewer people at the country’s game parks, vineyards and beaches.

“If South Africa falls off the tourism radar screen globally, to get it back on will take so much attention and focus,” he said.

Bookings for the first quarter of the year have so far not fallen, Ntshona and Nadasen say, though they have been fielding inquiries from worried potential visitors.

“We’ll get a better sense by the end of March, when we look at forward bookings for the next six months,” Ntshona said.

Tourism officials are well aware of the potential threat, however. In 2014, an Ebola crisis in West Africa — a six-hour plane flight away — led to a 23 percent drop in visitors to Ebola-free South Africa as tourists shunned African destinations, Ntshona said.

To try to prevent a repeat of that disaster, government and business leaders are rushing to shore up water supplies — and confidence.

Organizers of dozens of big conferences held in Cape Town each year are making plans to ship in water from other less thirsty parts of the country, Ntshona said.

Hotels have installed low-flow showerheads, turned off fountains and replaced cloth napkins with paper ones.

A Cape Town subsidiary of leading hotel chain Tsogo Sun is this week taking delivery of a pioneering desalination plant, to suck seawater from Cape Town’s harbor and churn out enough fresh water for the chain’s 1,400 Cape Town hotel rooms.

Cape Town itself is also making plans to bring in desalination plants — though not quickly enough to deal with the impending “Day Zero,” now pushed back to July after a successful campaign to cut the city’s water consumption by half.

Political obstacles

Experts have warned of water risks in Cape Town for years, but political infighting has gotten in the way of action, Ntshona admits.

Cape Town is run by an opposition party to the ruling African National Congress — and even the ANC saw its embattled leader, President Jacob Zuma, pushed out of office last week.

“Part of the lesson we’re learning as a country is that when you have a crisis, stop bickering and focus on the issues,” Ntshona said.

Another lesson, he said, is that water shortages — predicted to become longer and deeper across southern Africa as climate change strengthens droughts — cannot be seen as a passing problem.

Winter rains are expected in Cape Town starting in May or June. If they arrive, the current crisis will ease, officials predict.

But, regardless, “we need to recalibrate our relationship with water as a country,” Ntshona said.
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