South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) celebrated its anniversary this week by counting the party’s successes in the past 25 years.  But the ANC is battling with factionalism and corruption allegations against senior party members, which could affect its standing in upcoming May national elections.

In a speech Tuesday marking the 107th birthday of ANC, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa touted the party’s success since the end of apartheid.

“Our economy has tripled in size over the last 25 years.  Seven million more people are now employed today than they were in 1994. And we have taken bold steps to confront corruption,” Ramaphoda said.

The ANC was born January 8th, 1912, in the little town of Bloemfontein.

The party became famous for leaders like Nelson Mandela, who gave up his freedom to end apartheid, South Africa’s former system of racial segregation and discrimination.

But former ANC lawmaker Ben Turok said, a century later, the party of Mandela is a different organization.

“A catch-up culture penetrated the movement. Catch-up! The whites had this, we want the same. And that catch-up led to many of the problems that we have today,” Turok said.

These problems include the ANC’s mismanagement of state-owned enterprises, 25 percent unemployment, inequality, corruption, and a divided party.  

The ANC split last year between supporters of President Cyril Ramaphosa and disgraced former president Jacob Zuma after the latter was forced to resign over corruption allegations.

‘Fault lines’

Political analyst Theo Venter said the ANC is not in the best shape as the country heads toward May national elections.

“One can clearly see the fault lines in the ANC. There are factions talking about each other as factions. I think there is a far more urgent need for discussion, because I think the push back from the Zuma side in the ANC is threatening the unity,” Venter said.

Although the ANC has received the majority of votes in every election since the end of apartheid, the winning margins have been gradually decreasing.

Opposition parties are hoping to take advantage of the ANC’s waning support, including in its biggest support base – Kwazulu Natal Province.

Democratic Alliance party leader Zwakele Mncwango said the ANC is at its weakest moment.

“The main mission for us is to drop the ANC below 50 percent. We’ve seen it’s possible,” Mncwango said.

Political analyst Tinyiko Maluleke said although the ANC will no doubt win the coming elections, the party will no longer be able to rely solely on its liberation credentials.  South Africans are now demanding services like clean water and electricity.

“I think the most serious challenge is that perhaps the ANC has not managed to facilitate service delivery to the extent that the ANC as a party has been promising,” Maluleke said.

At the anniversary celebrations this week, the ANC sought to project an image of a confident and unified party.

Ramaphosa was side-by-side with Zuma and told the nation their comradeship is still at its best.

How much that translates into reversing the party’s downward trend will become clear with the May elections.

 
…

The United States military has killed six al-Shabab militants in Somalia, in the fourth airstrike there this week, according to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

The latest attack was carried out Tuesday in Somalia’s Bay region and destroyed one vehicle, an AFRICOM official told VOA.  He said no civilian casualties resulted from the attack.

On Monday, the U.S. military said it carried out two strikes in Somalia killing four al-Shabab extremists, in defense of Somali forces who “were engaged by al-Shabab militants.”

AFRICOM said another U.S. airstrike on Sunday killed six al-Shabab members near Dheerow Sanle in the Lower Shabelle region, and a strike on January 2 killed 10 militants in the same area.

The U.S. military says no civilians were killed or injured in these airstrikes.

According to AFRICOM, the U.S. military carried out 47 airstrikes in Somalia last year and 35 in 2017, killing hundreds of militants. Most targeted al-Shabaab, while some targeted Islamic State militants in the African country.

The al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab militant group continues to control large areas in southern and central Somalia. They are also responsible for deadly bombings in the capital, Mogadishu.
…

The U.S. embassy in the Democratic Republic of Congo is warning Americans to leave the country, as Congolese officials prepare to announce election results.

The embassy in Kinshasa posted an alert Wednesday that said Americans in Congo should make departure plans that do not rely on U.S. government assistance. It urged Americans to avoid large crowds and demonstrations, and monitor local media for updates.

Congo’s election commission has said it will announce results of the Dec. 30 election at 11 p.m. local time Wednesday.

Riot police began to gather outside election commission headquarters in Kinshasa on Wednesday afternoon as officials, who had met overnight, promised an announcement of provisional results.

In usually bustling Kinshasa, shops were shuttered. Provisional results were originally due several days ago, but officials said they were still counting ballots from the poll.

Congo on edge

The delays and other missteps have taken the election out of the realm of reality and into the murky world of rumor and speculation, analyst Richard Moncrieff of the International Crisis Group. And that, in a country as politically heated as Congo, is dangerous.

“The rumor mill is working at full-tilt, even despite the partial shutdown of all internet services in the country, and this obviously is unhelpful as people will produce evidence that they think favors their candidate, and so forth,” he told VOA.

Already, the influential Catholic Church, which deployed 40,000 observers throughout the country, fueled tensions by saying more than a week ago that it had identified a clear winner, and urged the electoral commission to make an announcement.

That led to speculation that the ruling party favorite, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, had lost the poll. He is the hand-picked successor of longtime President Joseph Kabila, who has remained in office more than two years beyond his mandate because of repeated delays in holding the election.

On Wednesday, as officials prepared to announce results, the presidents of South Africa and Zambia met to urge the electoral commission to “speedily finalize the vote tabulation and release the election results in order to maintain the credibility of elections.”

Stephanie Wolters, a longtime Congo analyst for the Institute for Security Studies, questioned the timing of their statement, and its effect.

“It really comes at a bizarre time,” she told VOA. “For [Cyril] Ramaphosa and Edgar Lungu to be engaging at this level about the DRC elections over 10 days after that election took place just seems like a hasty, last-minute afterthought to sort of put it on record that [regional bloc] SADC is doing something. The kind of statement they came out with today is the kind of statement they could have come out with weeks ago, without really having to meet with one another because there’s nothing controversial in it, and nothing unusual and nothing particularly strong.”

Delay ‘all about Kabila’

Moncrieff says the vote-counting delay is similarly unconvincing. The head of the electoral commission, Corneille Nangaa, is known to be fiercely loyal to Kabila.

“They are using the fact that they have not counted 100 percent of the vote as a pretext to play for time to allow Kabila to make what’s a political and not a technical decision,” he said. “Kabila will tell Nangaa who to declare winner. And Nangaa will follow that. So this is all about Kabila. Any delay is a political delay and it’s a delay because [of] Kabila, who after all hates making decisions and always tries to delay decisions.”

Congolese politics has always been a rough game. Kabila took power after the assassination of his father, who himself took power in a coup over totalitarian leader Mobutu Sese Seko.

​Moncrieff hopes this vote will have a more peaceful outcome.

“What’s at stake here is the winner-takes-all structure of Congolese politics, and that’s what makes people so afraid of losing,” he said. “And I think it’s beholden on the political actors to make statements that are inclusive to try to attenuate the winner-takes-all problem.”

That does not appear to be happening now, with opposition candidate Martin Fayulu, who many projected to be the winner of the poll, saying this week that “the election results are not negotiable.”

But negotiation seems to be an unknown concept in Congolese politics. When VOA reported from Kinshasa last month, the two leading presidential camps — Shadary and Fayulu — were asked if they would be interested in forming a coalition government in the future, or even working closely with their political opponents once in power.

Both dismissed the idea.
…

No schoolgirls in western Kenya are being forced to undergo examinations for female genital mutilation, Kenyan authorities said Tuesday, after a government official sparked outrage by proposing compulsory tests to curb the crime.

George Natembeya, commissioner for Narok County, said on Friday that girls returning to school after the Christmas break were being screened for female genital mutilation (FGM) in order to prosecute their parents and traditional cutters.

Rights groups condemned the move, saying examining the girls — aged between nine and 17 — was demeaning and contravened their right to privacy and dignity.

Kenya’s Anti-FGM Board said they had conducted an investigation in Narok after Natembeya’s statement and found no evidence of girls being tested.

“The Board hereby confirms that no girl has been paraded for FGM screening as per allegations that have been circulating in the last few days,” the semi-autonomous government agency said in a statement.

“The Board recognises and appreciates the role played by different stakeholders in complementing the government’s efforts in the FGM campaigns but we want to reiterate that all interventions must uphold the law.”

FGM, which usually involves the partial or total removal of the external genitalia, is prevalent across parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East — and is seen as necessary for social acceptance and increasing a girl’s marriage prospects.

FGM dangers

It is usually performed by traditional cutters, often with unsterilized blades or knives. In some cases, girls can bleed to death or die from infections. It can also cause lifelong painful conditions such as fistula and fatal childbirth complications.

Kenya criminalized FGM in 2011, but the deep-rooted practice persists. According to the United Nations, one in five Kenyan women and girls aged between 15 and 49 have undergone FGM.

Natembeya said he had announced the compulsory tests to warn communities not to practice FGM on their daughters, but that there was no intention to force all girls to undergo screening.

Rights groups said the policy was rolled back following outrage.

“We are not going to line up all the girls and test them — you can’t do that as they can be stigmatized,” he told Reuters.

“What we are doing is that if we get reports from schools that a girl has undergone FGM, it becomes a police case and the girl is taken to hospital and medically examined. Then the parents or caregivers will be arrested and taken to court.”
…

In rural Malawi, families send girls as young as 12 years old for “initiation,” a traditional, cultural practice that marks a child’s entry into adulthood. But child rights campaigners say the ritual entices young girls into early sex, marriage, and teenage pregnancy — forcing many to drop out of school. One local organization is seeking to change this by teaching initiation counselors to give girls age-appropriate information. 

Madalitso Makosa was 13 years old when she underwent a traditional, Malawian initiation ritual to become an adult. 

She says after the initiation ceremony, the counselors advised her to perform a Kusasa Fumbi or “removing the dust” ritual with a man of my choice. She chose to sleep with her former boyfriend but, unfortunately, became pregnant.

“Removing the dust” refers to a girl losing her virginity, often without protection, to become an adult.  Those who become teenage mothers pay the price for this tradition.

Makosa says when she discovered she was pregnant, she was devastated because she had to drop out of school. She is now struggling to get support to take care of her baby.  She wished she had continued with her education.”

During the initiation, counselors show how they prepare girls for marriage and for sex.

Agnes Matemba, is an initiation counselor. 

She says she gives girls these lessons so that they should keep their man and prevent him from going out to look for another woman. Because, if he goes out and finds excitement in other women, he is likely to dump her.

Child rights campaigners say the initiation ritual fuels Malawi’s high rate of child marriage.  Half the girls here marry before age 18.

Malawian group Youthnet and Counselling, YONECO, wants to keep girls in school with a more age-appropriate initiation ritual.

MacBain Mkandawire is YONECO’s executive director.

“This is a traditional cultural thing that people believe in, and it will be very difficult to just say let us end initiation ceremonies,” Mkandawire said. “But what we are saying is that can we package the curriculum in such way the young people are accessing the correct curriculum at the correct time?”

YONECO is working with initiation counselors and traditional leaders to tone down Malawi’s initiations. Already, some areas are banning the practice of encouraging sex after the ceremony.

Aidah Deleza is also known as Senior Chief Chikumbu.

“We say no, no, no,” Chikumbu said. “This is why we have a lot of girls drop out from school, that is why the population has just shot so high just because of that, just because a lot of girls now they have got babies, most of them they are not in marriage.”

To further discourage teenage pregnancy, traditional leaders like Chikumbu are dividing girls’ initiation rituals into two camps.

One is a simple ceremony for teenage girls like Makosa, while the other provides some sex education for older girls who are preparing to marry.  
…

A Congolese presidential candidate’s representatives have met with outgoing President Joseph Kabila’s camp to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, they said on Tuesday.

Kabila’s camp denied any such meetings had occurred since the December 30 election, for which provisional results are expected this week, but supporters of another candidate, who led opinion polls ahead of the vote, said they feared the government was maneuvering to squeeze him out of contention.

Members of opposition candidate Felix Tshisekedi’s campaign said they spoke with representatives of Kabila’s hand-picked candidate, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, in meetings aimed at promoting national reconciliation.

Kabila and Tshisekedi “have an interest in meeting to prepare for the peaceful and civilized transfer of power,” Jean-Marc Kabund told a news conference at which he said Tshisekedi was the “presumptive winner.”

Tshisekedi’s spokesman, Vidiye Tshimanga, later said Kabila and Tshisekedi had not met personally since the election but that their representatives had convened several times.

Barnabe Kikaya Bin Karubi, a spokesman for Shadary and one of Kabila’s senior advisers, denied there had been contacts with Tshisekedi or his representatives.

Supporters of Martin Fayulu, the opposition candidate who had a healthy pre-election poll lead, have voiced suspicions Kabila may be looking to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with Tshisekedi if his preferred candidate, Shadary, loses.

Fayulu and six other presidential candidates issued a statement on Tuesday saying: “the electoral results cannot be negotiated and under no circumstances will we or the Congolese people accept such results.”

In a tweet, Fayulu’s Lamuka coalition also criticized Tshisekedi for saying in an interview with a Belgian newspaper this week that Kabila deserves praise for agreeing to step down. Kabila is due to leave office this month but his refusal to go when his mandate expired in 2016 sparked protests in which security forces killed dozens of people.

“Falsifying the history of Congo by attributing to Mr. Kabila a false role in the advent of the [democratic] transfer of power would be an insult to the memory of all our martyrs who died for democracy,” it said. Urgent meeting

The election is meant to bring about Congo’s first democratic transition in 59 years of independence, but a disputed result could trigger the kind of violence that erupted after 2006 and 2011 elections and destabilize Congo’s eastern borderlands with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, where dozen of militia groups are active.

The streets of the eastern city of Goma were deserted on Tuesday evening after a rumor spread that the results were about to be announced. The election board has not given a date for the release of results, which have already been delayed past Sunday’s deadline.

Zambian President Edgar Lungu’s office said he was traveling to South Africa on Tuesday for an “urgent consultative meeting” with President Cyril Ramaphosa about the election.

Domestic observer mission SYMOCEL said on Tuesday it witnessed 52 major irregularities, including people tampering with results, in the 101 vote counting centers it monitored. There are 179 counting centers tallying the vote across Congo.

Its findings, and those of a Catholic Church observation mission that noted significant irregularities, are likely to fuel complaints about the outcome once it is announced, although regional observers said the vote went “relatively well.”

In its own news conference on Tuesday, the ruling coalition accused Fayulu’s campaign and Catholic bishops of trying to stoke post-election violence.

Last week, the bishops said they knew the winner of the election, a declaration widely seen as a warning to authorities against rigging the vote.
…