U.N. officials warn the deadly Ebola virus could be spread by refugees leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province.  Officials are urging neighboring countries to increase surveillance at border crossings.

More than 100 armed groups are involved in long-standing conflicts in DR Congo’s North Kivu province.  Ongoing fighting and instability in the region are adding layers of complexity and difficulty to international efforts to combat an Ebola outbreak in the region.

At least two decades of conflict has displaced more than one million of the province’s eight million inhabitants.  Peter Salama is World Health Organization emergency response chief.  He tells VOA an additional threat is posed by refugees.  He warns some of those fleeing into neighboring Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi may be taking the infection with them.

“So, not only do you have the problem of tracking that internal displacement, but then you have the potential exportation of infection across borders,” Salama said. “And, that is why we are already working with the government of Uganda particularly, but also Rwanda, which shares a border as well with northern Kivu to be fully prepared for any eventualities across the border.”  

The U.N. refugee agency is lending its expertise to this situation.  It is preparing shelters for at least 1,000 vulnerable Internally Displaced Persons and other extremely vulnerable people in the Ebola-affected Beni area.  It also is undertaking protection and monitoring activities.  

UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic says his agency’s staff in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania are on Ebola alert.

“Specifically, in Uganda, we have a continuous influx from the DRC.  Our operation has intensified the awareness-raising among the refugee and host communities.   We have also increased the infection control and outbreak preparedness measures,” Mahecic said. “And, we also are preparing for entry screening, that could be the temperature checks for arriving Congolese refugees at the borders.” 

Mahecic says around 92,000 Congolese refugees have fled to Uganda so far this year.  He says they are continuing to arrive at an average rate of between 100 and 200 a day.
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Emmerson Mnangagwa called Friday on his country to unite, a day after he was declared the narrow winner of Zimbabwe’s presidential election, while the opposition leader said the poll was a fraud and pledged to challenge the result.

Both Mnangagwa and opposition leader Nelson Chamisa held news conferences in Harare claiming they had won the election, the first poll since longtime leader Robert Mugabe’s removal from power. 

The election commission said Mnangagwa took 50.8 percent of the vote, while Chamisa received 44.3 percent. Because Mnangagwa won more than 50 percent of the vote, he avoids a runoff election.

Mnangagwa pledged Friday to be president for all Zimbabweans and said Chamisa would have a vital role to perform in the country’s future.

Chamisa said his Movement for Democratic Change party wanted a “proper result to be announced.”

“We are not accepting this fiction,” he said.

Chamisa also condemned the killing of six people at an opposition protest this week and said authorities should be held accountable.

Chamisa supporters erupt

Mnangagwa called for an independent investigation into the election violence, which began when hundreds of Chamisa supporters, angry that announcement of the election results had been postponed, threw rocks at police outside commission headquarters Wednesday.

Police responded with tear gas and water cannons. The army was called in, and witnesses said soldiers beat and shot at marchers. In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded. 

Mnangagwa said the violence was “unfortunate.”

The United States said Friday that it was reviewing Zimbabwe’s election results and called on political leaders to “show magnanimity in victory and graciousness in defeat.” The State Department said it would continue to review the data before making “a complete assessment of the overall election.”

“We encourage all stakeholders and citizens to pursue any grievances peacefully and through established legal channels,” the department’s statement said.

Zimbabwe’s election commission has said turnout for Monday’s election was high in most provinces, but that a large number of votes had to be rejected.

Mnangagwa was vice president and took over for the authoritarian Mugabe after the latter was forced from office last year.

Mnangagwa and the ruling ZANU-PF party must try to fix Zimbabwe’s ailing economy and poor international image while also dealing with a population demanding change after 40 years of Mugabe.
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South Sudanese President Salva Kiir said Friday he plans to sign a final power-sharing deal with rebels and other opposition groups intended to end the country’s nearly five-year civil war.  

Earlier, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mohamed Al Dirdiri arrived in Juba to discuss what he called “bilateral issues” with Kiir and South Sudanese Foreign Minister Nhial Deng Nhial.

Al-Dirdiri, the chief mediator of the ongoing peace talks, told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus he expects all parties to sign an agreement in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, on Sunday.

Most of South Sudan’s warring parties signed a preliminary power-sharing deal late last month which would reinstate rebel leader Riek Machar as first vice president. But some opposition groups rejected the agreement.

After speaking to al-Dirdiri on Friday, Kiir told journalists he is ready to sign a power-sharing deal with all opposition parties and this time believes it will be upheld.

“I believe that this agreement will continue to be implemented with spirit and letter. And so whoever signs this agreement will remain committed to it and this is what will be surprising the whole world,” said Kiir.

The president said he made some compromises with opposition groups because he wants the agreement to hold. He said he has no reservations about the Khartoum agreement, unlike the peace deal he signed in 2015 that “was forced on us,” he said Friday. 

While insisting he is fully committed to implementing a new deal, the president acknowledged the huge challenges that lie ahead for his government, including how to manage a planned 550 lawmakers, 35 ministries, and five vice presidents.

“One person needs [a] motorcade, maybe five vehicles. Where will I get this quickly? They also need accommodation. Where will I accommodate them. Also they need offices to work. Where will I get offices? So there are many things needed to be accomplished before these people enter Juba here,” Kiir said.

One possible holdout

One armed opposition group, the National Salvation Front, led by Thomas Cirillo Swaka, said it will not sign a peace deal that fails to guarantee a federal system of governance in South Sudan.

The group’s information secretary, Jalphan Samson, said if arguments over the number of states or holding a referendum are not resolved, his group will refuse to sign the deal.

“We don’t want to cheat ourselves and we don’t want to cheat our people … If the thing is solved before the signing, we will sign but if there is something, we will not sign with reservations because if I sign with reservations, that means I did not agree on that,” Samson told VOA.

He said the National Salvation Front believes South Sudan’s future transitional government should revert back to the original 10 states instead of the current 32, which he calls unconstitutional. 

Samson also said the federal system of governance should be introduced immediately during the transitional period, allowing everyone to have a voice in government.

“Our position is we want every individual South Sudanese must get his right in this agreement. That is why we don’t want to make agreement and others feel that they are betrayed,” Samson said.
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The allegations in the DRC are horrendous: mass rapes, mutilations and beheadings.

If proven, such atrocities could constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, said Bacre Waly Ndiaye, the leader of a United Nations team investigating violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kasai province.

Two years of fighting there between the army and two opposing militias have left up to 5,000 people dead, displaced 1.4 million and sent 30,000 fleeing to neighboring Angola.

But Ndiaye emphasized to VOA that such horrific acts still fall short of genocide, which must include a proven intent to wipe out an entire ethnic, national, racial or religious group.

Ndiaye’s point follows remarks by the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture worldwide, Nils Melzer, who recently suggested that conditions in the central African country were fast approaching those that led to genocide more than 20 years ago in Rwanda and the Balkans.

“My greatest concern is that what we are witnessing today may be only the prelude of what is still to come,” Melzer told the Reuters news service last month.

Ndiaye and others working with the U.N. Human Rights Council have collected graphic and unsettling evidence testimony from survivors and witness to the violence. Their eight-month investigation found all armed groups guilty of mass atrocities.

But Ndiaye and other observers say there is not enough evidence to link individual acts of violence or even massacres to the focused intent to eliminate an entire ethnic group.

Seeking solutions

The international community is looking for ways to end the conflict.

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, in a July statement about the country’s “deteriorating situation,” urged “much stronger efforts to hold the perpetrators of violations responsible. The perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence must also be held to account even, and perhaps especially, when they are agents of the State.”

Ndiaye agrees, saying an end to the violence requires an end to impunity.

The team’s findings “are in the hands of the high commissioner, so it’s possible to prosecute,” he said. “But there will never be enough courts or resources to prosecute thousands of perpetrators.”

Longtime President Joseph Kabila’s administration wants international support to improve the civilian court system widely seen as understaffed and dysfunctional but meanwhile is using military courts to try the accused.

Target prominent perpetrators

Ndiaye said it’s impossible to try everyone accused of atrocities. Instead, he said the international community and the government should establish a policy that “would target individuals whose trial [would] be emblematic enough to have impact on deep-rooted impunity” and “include those who played a leadership role, be it within the militias or the security forces.”

Human rights activists say the government has been slow to bring perpetrators to justice in Kasai, an opposition stronghold. Kabila has denied the accusation.

“I demand justice be done that no one … involved in this tragedy be spared from accountability,” Kabila said in announcing a judicial inquiry in April 2017.

Alan Ngari, a senior researcher with the Transnational Threats and International Crime Division at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa, questioned whether politics might be behind the Congo government’s response.

“It almost feels,” he said, “like [the government is saying] let part of the country fester. As long as [authorities] can continue to get popular support from other regions, that is fine and we will continue on with the elections later this year.”

Elections, delayed since late 2016, are scheduled for December 23.

Peace talks encouraged

Besides taking legal action, Ngari said the government must begin talking with opponents in Kasai. It also must take responsibility for mishandling local issues involving customary leaders and introduce ways to resolve disputes without the use of deadly force.

He urged a reconciliation process that looks at the root causes of the violence, disarms militias and reintegrates child soldiers. He also recommends compensation and support to victims of rape, the internally displaced and those who have fled to neighboring countries. Investigations must continue into abuses by all armed forces, including the military.

The U.N. is naming two experts to study the details and conclusions of Ndiaye’s team, which assessed the situation in DRC. They will offer proposals on specific actions that the government, U.N. agencies and donors can take to end the violence in Kasai.

Conflict’s evolution

The conflict involves the army and two opposing militias: the Kamuina Nsapu, whose members come largely from the Luba ethnic group, and the Bana Mura, composed of Chokwe, Pende and Tetela fighters.

Tensions started two years ago, when the Congolese government overruled the Bajila Kasanga administrative unit over traditional authority in several villages in Kasai-Central province.

Kabila’s administration opposed naming a popular Luba, Jean-Prince Pandi, as the customary chief. Pandi was suspected of links to the country’s political opposition.

Pandi was killed by security forces in August 2016, and violence erupted. His militia, the Kamuina Nsapu, rapidly expanded its rebellion against the government and its supporters.

The government’s supporters in turn formed the Bana Mura and other militias to crack down on the uprising, which spread to Kasai’s other provinces.
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George Kamau Githome uses a feather duster to clean off hardware and bootleg movies displayed for sale at his kiosk in Mathare, one of Nairobi, Kenya’s largest slums.

Githome and his family of 10 kids recently lost everything they owned in a fire. But he was able to rebuild because he had purchased micro-insurance, a new product making inroads among small-scale African farmers and business owners.

“When they came, they took photos, and saw how helpless I was. I had nothing,” he said. “Then they paid off my loan and supported me with something small. I started this business you see out here and the result you see inside.”

Most African farmers and small businesses operate with no way to protect themselves if disaster strikes. Insurers have been slow to tailor their products to the African continent, experts say, and their methods of operation, using complex contracts distributed through networks of agents, tends to only reach the urban elite.

But that may be starting to change. A handful of companies are now offering inexpensive, tech-driven micro-insurance and are making it easy for ordinary Africans to sign up.

 

The company Githome used, MicroEnsure, offers micro-insurance to small-business owners, ranging from farmers in the bush to small kiosk owners in downtown Nairobi.

 

The East Africa regional director for MicroEnsure, Kiereini Kirika, says mobile technology makes micro-insurance cheaper and easy to use.

“We enable them to be able to enroll as simple as using their mobile phone just by dialing a particular short code on their phone and then registering their product just by using their first name and their last name,” he said.

Henry Jaru, a smallholder farmer in northern Nigeria, is buying micro-insurance from another company, Pula, to protect his family farm from the impacts of poor rainfall, army worm infestations and other threats to their crops.

“Normally by this time the crops would have gone far but you see we’re still planting some of them,” he said. “So I think, we’re hoping that [will protect us if] we experience any shortcoming from the rain or the worms this year.”

 

Pula insures groups of farmers, using publicly available satellite data to track weather patterns, assess the risk and set prices.

 

“When Pula came into the country, they came with the idea of an index insurance, which means that you don’t need to necessarily visit every smallholder farmers,” said Samson Ajibola, Pula’s senior project manager in Nigeria. “You can insure aggregation of farmers under just one policy without necessarily needing to visit each of them.”

Pula also bundles the policies into small loans or purchases of fertilizer so small-hold farmers are automatically insured.

 

But older farmers, like Jaru’s father Thomas, are still skeptical because of bad experiences with insurance companies.

 

“Generally when the time comes for them to pay you, indemnify you, you will not find them,” said Thomas Jaru. “They begin to show you the small print — you didn’t do this, you didn’t do that out of the policy. So, it can ruin the whole thing and people get discouraged.”

 

Micro-insurance providers hope their services can change that perception  and turn a profit while giving Africa’s small farmers and businesses some protection if and when things go wrong.
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