The Democratic Republic of Congo said on Wednesday it had pulled accreditation for a French radio journalist and cut broadcasts from the station, as well as a local television channel, amid tensions over the counting of votes in crucial elections.

The authorities said accreditation for the Radio France Internationale (RFI) correspondent in Kinshasa, Florence Morice, had been withdrawn.

Government spokesman Lambert Mende accused Morice of violating electoral law and “the code of good conduct for foreign journalists covering the elections”.

Accusing the station of stirring controversy, he said, “RFI’s broadcasts have been cut off in all of Congo’s cities.”

“We are not going to let a radio station throw petrol on the flames at a time when we are waiting for the compilation of the provisional results,” Mende said.

Mende said authorities also cut the signal of local Canal Congo television, seen as close to the opposition, for broadcasting election results ahead of an official announcement. A journalist at the station confirmed that its signal had been cut from 1500 GMT.

RFI maintains professionalism

RFI, a French public-service broadcaster, has a very large audience in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a French-speaking country of around 80 million people.

It has been closely covering Sunday’s presidential elections and the marathon vote tally.

RFI issued a statement saying its coverage had been impartial and expressing full support for Morice.

She had been “merely working as a professional journalist,” it said, and urged the authorities to reverse their decision to withdraw her accreditation.

On Tuesday, RFI said that its broadcasts had been blocked since Monday evening.

Preliminary election results are due by Sunday, definitive results by January 15, with the next head of state due to be sworn in January 18. Legislative and municipal elections also took place.

Suspicions

The elections will determine who succeeds President Joseph Kabila, at the helm of sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest country for nearly 18 years.

Kabila refused to step down after his two-term constitutional limit ended in 2016, sparking protests that were quelled at the cost of scores of lives.

Among the DRC’s opposition, suspicions run deep that the vote will be rigged to let his preferred successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, be declared winner.

Shadary and two leaders of the divided opposition — Martin Fayulu and Etienne Tshisekedi — are the perceived frontrunners in the vote.

Mende said RFI had been “declaring results (and) trends” as the vote count unfolded.

“Only the head of CENI can proclaim” these, he said, referring to the Independent National Electoral Commission, in charge of overseeing the elections and the count.

Internet cut

On Monday, the authorities cut off the internet, a move that opposition activists said sought to gag communications and stifle transparency.

An adviser to Kabila, Barnabe Kikaya Bin Karubi, on Tuesday said the move targetted the dissemination of “fake figures” to avert a “popular uprising.”

But on Wednesday, Kikaya, speaking as spokesman for the coalition of governing parties, the FCC, called on the authorities to “show flexibility” and “rapidly restore (internet access) across the country.”

“Among other things, the cut is hampering our system for collecting and compiling results,” Kikaya said.

The European Union, United States, Canada and Switzerland on Tuesday urged the government to restore access.

The influential Roman Catholic Church, which is monitoring the election, said the internet cut had caused it to postpone by a day an interim report on the ballot that it had expected to published on Wednesday.

An alliance of citizens’ group called SYMOCEL, the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) also deployed observers.

The African Union (AU) issued a statement Wednesday saying Sunday’s vote had taken place “in a peaceful and tranquil atmosphere, despite interference and all the security, political and organizational challenges.”

The head of the AU observation mission, former Malian President Diacounda Traore, met late Wednesday with the two main opposition candidates and a representative of Shadary.

“Africa has its eyes on you. Make sure we are not disappointed,” Traore said after the meeting. “We told them to face up to their responsibilities.”

The DRC has a long history of turmoil, and many fear a bloodbath if the elections go badly wrong.

The mineral-rich country has never had a peaceful handover of power since it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.

Millions of people died from fighting, starvation and disease in two full-fledged wars between 1996 and 2003, and bloodshed marred elections in 2006 and 2011.

 
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From its hillside overlooking the Ethiopian capital, Berhanu Mengistu’s century-old, gabled family home has seen emperors and governments rise and fall.

It has withstood economic stagnation and the rapid population growth that replaced its once-patrician neighbors with a rabble of shacks.

But it now stands lonely in a field of weeds, the house’s corrugated roof and red plaster walls stark against a fast-changing cityscape of cleared slums, tower cranes and glinting high rises.

Palatial homes like Berhanu’s are scattered throughout Addis Ababa, built for imperial-era courtiers and foreign business moguls, but most have slid into dire neglect as the government focuses on an aspirational building boom.

“Nowadays, most of the buildings you see are more of the European architecture,” said Berhanu, a supply chain manager whose house has been in his family for seven generations.

Across the capital, older, poorer neighborhoods — like the one that once surrounded Berhanu’s home — have been leveled to make way for glass-and-concrete towers, lauded by the government as a symbol of the rapid economic expansion transforming one of Africa’s poorest countries.

But preservationists worry that the breakneck development comes at the cost of the capital’s architectural heritage.

“There are isolated efforts of protecting, saving historic buildings, but it’s really very limited,” said Fasil Giorghis, a well-known architect.

“It is not even a given that you should protect a historic building.”

A young city

Addis Ababa was founded in the late 19th century by Emperor Menelik II as he expanded the Ethiopian empire from the country’s northern highlands to its modern boundaries.

The young city soon filled with houses belonging to members of Menelik’s government, among them Berhanu’s ancestor Yemtu Beznash, the family matriarch and administrator of a powerful law court.

Menelik, who died in 1913, also hired Armenians as city engineers, while merchants came from India and Yemen.

That cosmopolitanism was upended in 1974 with the arrival of the Derg military junta, which dismantled the Ethiopian empire.

Fasil recounted how, as foreign traders fled, the communist-leaning Derg handed their former mansions to poor tenants, who could not afford to maintain the earthen walls and wooden floors.

‘Ideological shift’

The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), which evicted the Derg in 1991 and continues to rule today, has presided over an economic boom.

This has seen contractors from China and elsewhere set to work on half-built skyscrapers that give the capital’s skyline a jagged, unfinished feel.

Maheder Gebremedhin, an architect who hosts a radio show discussing the trade, says the neglect of the old buildings is due to the cost and complexity of renovation, as well as a lingering ambivalence toward the imperial past.

“Because of the ideological shift, there is not a real interest to keep these buildings,” Maheder said.

Heritage abandoned

Government and private donors have successfully restored a handful of buildings, including one of Menelik’s palaces and the mansion of a former defense minister that’s been converted into a museum.

But city authorities acknowledge that most of the 440 buildings that have been designated heritage sites are rundown.

“Because of our capacity as a developing country, they can’t be repaired all the time,” said Worku Mengesha, a spokesman for Addis Ababa’s tourism office.

A decade ago, foreign embassies and Ethiopian preservationists tried to restore the Mohammadali house, once the property of a wealthy Indian businessman featuring prominent Indian and Arabian architectural elements in addition to its imperial-era Ethiopian style.

However, bureaucracy and shoddy construction scuppered the effort, Fasil said.

As a result, it is padlocked and abandoned, with parked cars sheltering beneath its Indian-inspired arches and a pair of discarded trousers draped across its faded cream staircase.

Other historic buildings continue in their Derg-era role of housing for the poor, or in their slow decrepitude.

The expansive former palace of Hojele Al-Hassen, a wealthy traditional ruler during the Menelik era, still houses people from his western region, who spend after-work hours socializing on the wraparound veranda.

But it’s increasingly dilapidated, with an entire decaying wing that once served as a school classroom sealed off for safety.

Family history, city history

Three years ago, as city authorities leveled the homes that had mushroomed around Berhanu’s house, he kept the bulldozers at bay by having his home designated an historic building.

Berhanu now hopes to turn his family history into national history.

Standing near a large portrait of the matriarch Yemtu, he spoke of his dream to make a museum of the house whose rooms are filled with family photographs and heirlooms, including a wall-spanning snake skin.

“This is not only our property. It belongs to all Ethiopians and people of Addis Ababa,” he said.

He hopes the city will agree.

Across the street in the slum area the government wants cleared, his neighbor Solomon Damana had recently resolved a dispute with city authorities and was following orders to demolish the small family home in which he was born and raised and move to a one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of town.

“I’m happy that one isn’t demolished,” he said, gesturing at Berhanu’s place. “It’s an historic house.”
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Laborers milled around an unfinished eight-story building in an expansive field in Konza dotted with zebra and antelope — the only visible sign of progress in a decade-old plan to make Kenya into Africa’s leading technology hub by 2030.

Grandiose plans, red tape and a lack of funding have left Konza Technopolis — the $14.5 billion new city to be built some 60 km (37 miles) southeast of Nairobi — way behind schedule on its goal of having 20,000 people on site by 2020.

“It has taken too long and I think people have moved on,” said tech entrepreneur Josiah Mugambi, founder of Alba.one, a Nairobi-based software company, who was initially excited by the government’s ambitious project.

Dubbed the Silicon Savannah, Konza aims to become a smart city — using tech to manage water and electricity efficiently and reduce commuting time — and a solution to the rapid, unplanned urbanization which has plagued existing cities.

About 40 percent of Africa’s 1 billion people live in towns and cities and the World Bank predicts the urban population will double over the next 25 years, adding pressure to already stretched infrastructure.

Konza’s dream is to become a top business process outsourcing hub by 2030, with on-site universities training locals to feed into a 200,000-strong tech-savvy workforce providing IT support and call center services remotely.

But the first building has yet to be completed on the 5,000-acre former cattle ranch, three years after breaking ground, and business has shifted its focus to other African countries, like Rwanda, with competing visions to become modern tech hubs.

“Nobody can wait that long for a city to be built. For a tech entrepreneur, they think about where their startup will be two to three years down the line,” said Mugambi.

Other smart cities planned across Africa include Nigeria’s Eko Atlantic City near Lagos that will house 250,000 people on land reclaimed from the sea, Ghana’s Hope City and an Ethiopian city styled as the real Wakanda after the film “Black Panther.”

Utopian

Bringing such utopian schemes to life is no easy task for African governments that are struggling to provide adequate roads, power, water and security to their existing cities.

“Upgrading infrastructure in places like Kibera (slum) in Nairobi to provide water and a better sewerage system is equally as important as building a new city such as Konza,” said Abdu Muwonge, a senior urban specialist with the World Bank in Kenya.

Some critics say Konza was ill-conceived from the start.

“The vision is wrong; the vision is too big,” said Aly-Khan Satchu, a Nairobi-based independent financial analyst.

“This is miles from anywhere. There are not leveraging the existing infrastructure … It is assuming that you can bring in academia, you can bring in venture capital, you can bring in corporates.”

The first serious hurdle arose in 2012 when the National Land Commission (NLC), which manages public land, introduced a cumbersome land acquisition procedure, said Bitange Ndemo, who led a team that conceived Konza Technopolis in 2008.

“The NLC was saying we should follow the processes of acquiring public land, which would take years to complete,” Ndemo, now an associate professor of business at the University of Nairobi, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The delays caused at least one deal with a German university to fall through, he said, as the process was much slower than the old one where investors signed deals directly with government ministries which took care of land leases.

To resolve this, the government transferred ownership of the site to the Konza Technopolis Development Authority (KoTDA), set up in 2012 to co-ordinate development of the new city, which now allocates land to investors on 50-year renewable leases.

Cold Feet

Financing has also proven a major issue.

In its strategic plan, the government promised to fund 10 percent of Konza, laying the infrastructure, while the private sector would come in with the rest of the money to build universities, offices, housing and hotels.

But the government was slow to contribute its share and has yet to pass a law to create KoTDA as a legal entity which would make it easier to sign contracts with external lenders, said Lawrence Esho, one of Konza’s project planners until 2013.

“They are way behind schedule partly because the government took time to give Konza money,” he said, adding that no money came in until 2013.

“This stopped any work from starting at the site and investors may have developed cold feet as they waited.”

KoTDA’s chief executive, John Tanui, said the government has committed to invest more than 80 billion shillings ($780 million).

“When I say committed does not mean we have absorbed. Our absorption is less than 10 percent of that figure,” he said, without elaborating.

The government has stepped up funding since 2017, said Abraham Odeng, deputy secretary at Kenya’s Information Communications and Technology ministry, without giving figures.

Odeng pointed to a 40 billion shilling contract signed in 2017 with an Italian firm to build roads, water and sewerage infrastructure by 2021, funded by the Italian government.

“That is a concessional loan, which is a long-term loan that the Kenyan government will pay,” he said.

Drop in the Ocean

But Kenya’s growing reliance on loans is causing jitters, with the International Monetary Fund warning of an increased risk of default.

The Washington-based lender forecast Kenya’s total public debt will reach 63 percent of economic output or GDP for 2018, up from 53 percent in 2016, citing the government’s public investment drive and revenue shortfalls.

The World Bank’s Muwonge said the issue is eliminating challenges for the private sector to do business.

“Getting Konza city off the ground will require that we pull in private capital with concessions for them to deliver certain kinds of infrastructure for which the government may not have resources,” he said.

Five local investors, including Nairobi-based software developer Craft Silicon and the state-run Kenya Electricity Transmission Company, are expected to build offices, residential buildings and hotels by 2020, KoTDA head Tanui said.

But critics say it is not enough.

“What (investors) have allocated so far is still a drop in the ocean,” said Ndemo, the former government technocrat.

And international interest is shifting elsewhere.

Rwanda — widely regarded as the least corrupt country in East Africa — launched its Kigali Innovation City in 2015, designed to host 50,000 people in universities and tech companies on a 70-hectare site outside the capital.

The $2 billion plan, due for completion by 2020, is seven times cheaper than Konza.

“All these other (cities) have better proximity, have better density and have better collaborative feedback loops,” said financial analyst Satchu. “We are now at a serious disadvantage vis-a-vis these other countries.”

($1 = 102.5000 Kenyan shillings)
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Armed men killed 37 Fulani civilians Tuesday in central Mali, where ethnic violence cost hundreds of lives last year, the government said.

Violence between Fulani and rival communities has compounded an already dire security situation in Mali’s semi-arid and desert regions, which are used as a base by jihadist groups with ties to al-Qaida and Islamic State.

The government said in a statement that the attackers, who were dressed as traditional Donzo hunters, raided the village of Koulogon in the central Mopti region and that some of the victims were children.

Moulage Guindo, the mayor of Bankass, the nearest town, said the attack occurred around the time of the first call to prayer of the new year and targeted the Fulani part of Koulogon.

He said another part of Koulogon is mostly inhabited by Dogon, an ethnic group to which the Donzos are linked, less than 1 km (half a mile) away.

Mali has been in turmoil since Tuareg rebels and loosely allied Islamists took over its north in 2012, prompting French forces to intervene to push them back the following year.

Islamists have since regained a foothold in the north and center, tapping into ethnic rivalries to recruit new members.
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