An international team of scientists is rushing to save West Africa’s Atlantic humpback dolphin, which environmental groups say has been pushed to the brink of extinction. In 1987, Senegal banned nylon monofilament fishing nets that threaten dolphins and other marine life, but critics say the government has failed to enforce the law. Annika Hammerschlag reports from Senegal’s Sine Saloum Delta.
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Officials in Tanzania say they have arrested South African national Thabo Bester, a convicted murderer known as the Facebook Rapist.

The 35-year-old Bester picked up the Facebook Rapist moniker because he used the social media platform to meet woman. He was convicted of murder for killing one of the women he met through the site and was sentenced to life in prison.

Last year, it was announced that he had died in a prison fire. This year, however, news of sightings of Bester began to emerge in South Africa.

A DNA analysis of the burned body thought to be his revealed that the body was someone else. Bester had escaped prison.

His escape has raised questions about whether prison officials aided him in his escape.
…

Muslims across South Africa are observing Ramadan with prayer and fasting. But some also see the holy month as an opportunity to reach out to those in need within their communities. Zaheer Cassim spoke to residents in Johannesburg and has the story.
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South Africa police say prison escapee arrested in Tanzania

(RADIO)

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South African police say that a convicted murderer who faked his death to escape prison has been arrested in Tanzania following a two-week manhunt. South African Justice Minister Ronald Lamola said officials are going to Tanzania Sunday to begin to extradite Thabo Bester, 35. Bester was dubbed the “Facebook Rapist” as he used the social media platform to lure at least two women he was convicted of raping. He was also found guilty of killing one. Bester was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012 and it was reported in May last year that he died in a fire in his cell. However, nearly a year later an investigation showed that the body found in the cell was not his.

(WEB)

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A South African convicted murderer who faked his death to escape from prison has been arrested in Tanzania following a two-week manhunt, police have announced.

South African officials are going to Tanzania Sunday to begin to extradite Thabo Bester, 35, dubbed the “Facebook Rapist” as he used the social media platform to lure at least two women he was convicted of raping. He was also found guilty of killing one.

Bester was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012 and it was reported in May last year that he died in a fire in his prison cell.

However, reports surfaced of him being seen in Johannesburg and an investigation including DNA samples showed that the body found burned beyond recognition in the cell was not his.

Two weeks ago police said they were chasing Bester and last week they raided a luxurious home he was believed to have been renting in a posh Johannesburg suburb.

Bester was apprehended with his girlfriend Nandipha Magudumana, a well-known celebrity doctor, and a Mozambican national believed to have assisted them to cross borders and evade law enforcement authorities, officials announced.

They were found with several fake passports which were unstamped at the time of their arrest, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the Kenyan border.

Authorities have now started the process to extradite the fugitives back to South Africa, where they are expected to face several charges. “An official delegation from South Africa, comprising senior officials from the police and the department of justice and correctional services will depart for Tanzania on Sunday,” Justice Minister Ronald Lamola said Saturday, announcing Bester’s arrest.

The South African news outlet GroundUp reported that for nearly a year after his prison escape Bester had lived a lavish lifestyle with Magudumana in Johannesburg’s upmarket Hyde Park suburb.

While in prison, Bester used a laptop he had for studies to run an event and production company, GroundUp reported. At one point he addressed a conference from his prison cell, telling attendees that he was speaking from the U.S., it reported.

Bester’s elaborate escape from prison has raised many questions about the possible involvement of prison officials.

At least three officials have been fired from the Mangaung Correctional Centre from where Bester escaped, according to local reports. The prison was managed privately by the British-based G4S security firm. The South African government has now taken over management of the maximum security prison and has announced that the G4S contract to manage the prison will not be renewed when it expires in 2026.
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With the whir of a mower under a clear blue sky, Senegalese researchers have begun harvesting a crop of experimental homegrown wheat, the latest step in a yearslong effort to reduce reliance on imports.

The second-most consumed cereal after rice, wheat is an important staple in the bread-loving West African nation.

But Senegal, like many of its neighbors, depends entirely on foreign supplies.

It imports 800,000 metric tons of the grain per year.

Its tropical climate is not naturally suited to wheat, but domestic trials have been underway for years.

Supply chain problems, rising grain prices and inflation caused by the war in Ukraine have added urgency to the country’s efforts to achieve self-sufficiency.

Four varieties

Since late last week, researchers from the Senegalese Institute for Agricultural Research, a public research institute, have been harvesting four varieties of wheat on a demonstration plot in Sangalkam, 35 kilometers from the capital Dakar.

Three of the varieties are Egyptian and the fourth was developed by the institute.

It operates five demonstration plots in total, two near Dakar and three in the Senegal River Valley, and has tested hundreds of wheat varieties, Amadou Tidiane Sall, one of the researchers, told AFP.

Not all thrive

Many have proved unsuitable.

The Sangalkam crop, one of several successful experiments by the institute, was sown in early January and matured in three months during Senegal’s cold season.

Agriculture Minister Aly Ngouille Ndiaye visited the plot earlier this month.

He said he had requested Egyptian seeds on a visit to the North African country for the United Nations’ COP27 climate conference in November.

“We have significant potential,” the minister said during his visit, promising the government would work with the private sector to expand trial plots.

He acknowledged that a lack of adequate water for irrigation posed a significant challenge.

Not everyone is convinced that wheat can be grown at scale in Senegal.

Amadou Gaye, the president of the National Federation of Bakers of Senegal, who represents about 2,500 bakeries across the country, told AFP he would prefer to see resources dedicated to producing local cereals such as millet, maize and sorghum.
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Forty-four civilians have been killed by “armed terrorist groups” in two villages in northeastern Burkina Faso near the Niger border, a regional governor said Saturday.

The provisional toll of “this despicable and barbaric attack” which targeted the villages of Kourakou and Tondibi in northeast Burkina Faso overnight Thursday “is 44 civilians killed and others wounded,” said Rodolphe Sorgho, lieutenant-governor of the Sahel region.

Sorgho said that 31 people had died in Kourakou and 13 in Tondibi.

The regional official said that an army offensive put “out of action the armed terrorist groups” that carried out the killings.

The governor also assured that “actions to stabilize the area are under way.”

The impoverished Sahel country is grappling with a 7-year-old campaign by jihadis linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.

A resident of Kourakou told Agence France-Presse that “a large number of terrorists burst into the village” late Thursday.

“All night long, we heard gunfire. It was on Friday morning that we saw that there were several dozen dead,” he said.

Attack was act of retaliation, say locals

Locals said the village had been targeted in retaliation for the lynching of two jihadis a few days earlier who had tried to steal cattle.

It was one of the deadliest attacks since Captain Ibrahim Traore came to power in a coup last September,

In February, 51 soldiers were killed in an attack on Deou, in the far north of the country.

The latest twin attacks happened close to the village of Seytenga, where 86 civilians were killed last June in one of the bloodiest attacks of a long-running insurgency.

Burkina Faso’s new military chief this week vowed to step up a “dynamic offensive” against jihadis following a string of insurgent attacks since the start of the year.

“The dynamic offensive underway in the past few weeks will be stepped up to force armed groups to lay down their weapons,” said Colonel Celestin Simpore after a handover ceremony following his appointment last week.

Thousands killed, millions displaced

Since the jihadis launched their campaign from neighboring Mali in 2015, more than 10,000 civilians, troops and police have been killed, according to one NGO estimate, and at least 2 million people have been displaced.

Official figures say jihadis effectively control about 40% of the country.

Frustration within the military led to two military coups last year. Traore, who came to power in September, has vowed to fight back and recover conquered territory.

But the jihadis have carried out a succession of raids and ambushes since the start of the year, inflicting heavy tolls on civilians and military-escorted convoys.

Burkina’s beleaguered army has recently acquired foreign-made drones, and regularly issues video footage of strikes against purported terrorists and troops described as reconquering and securing lost territory.

Since Traore seized power last year, the activities of all political parties and civil society organizations in the country have been suspended.
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Gobonamang Kgetho has a deep affection for Africa’s largest inland delta, the Okavango. It is his home. 

The water and wildlife-rich land is fed by rivers in the Angolan highlands that flow into northern Botswana before draining into Namibia’s Kalahari Desert sands. Several Indigenous and local communities and a vast array of species, including African elephants, black rhinos and cheetahs, live among the vibrant marshlands. Much of the surrounding region is also teeming with wildlife. 

Fisher Kgetho hails from Botswana’s Wayei community and relies on his pole and dug-out canoe to skirt around the marshes looking for fish. But things have changed in recent years — in the delta and across the country. 

“The fish sizes have shrunk and stocks are declining,” Kgetho, whose life and livelihood depends on the health of the ecosystem, told The Associated Press. “The rivers draining into the delta have less volumes of water.” 

Drilling for oil exploration, as well as human-caused climate change leading to more erratic rainfall patterns and water abstraction and diversion for development and commercial agriculture, has altered the landscape that Kgetho and so many other people and wildlife species, rely on. 

The delta’s defenders are now hoping to block at least one of those threats — oil exploration. 

A planned hearing by Namibia’s environment ministry will consider revoking the drilling license of Canadian oil and gas firm Reconnaissance Energy. Local communities and environmental groups claimed that land was bulldozed and cut through, damaging lands and polluting water sources, without the permission of local communities. 

Kgetho worries that rivers in his region are drying up because of “overuse by the extractive industries, including oil exploration activities upstream.” 

In a written statement, ReconAfrica, the firm’s African arm, said it safeguards water resources through “regular monitoring and reporting on hydrological data to the appropriate local, regional and national water authorities” and is “applying rigorous safety and environmental protection standards.” 

The statement went on to say that it has held over 700 community consultations in Namibia and will continue to engage with communities in the country and in Botswana. 

The company has been drilling in the area since 2021 but is yet to find a productive well. The hearing was originally scheduled for Monday but has been postponed until further notice. The drilling license is currently set to last until 2025, with ReconAfrica previously having been granted a three-year extension. 

Locals have persisted with legal avenues but have had little luck. In a separate case, Namibia’s high court postponed a decision on whether local communities should pay up for filing a case opposing the company’s actions. 

The court previously threw out the urgent appeal made by local people to stop the Canadian firm’s drilling activities. It’s now deciding whether the government’s legal fees should be covered by the plaintiffs or waived. A new date for the decision is set for May. 

The Namibian energy minister, Tom Alweendo, has maintained the country’s right to explore for oil, saying that European countries and the U.S. do it too. Alweendo supports the African Union’s goal of using both renewable and non-renewable energy to meet growing demand. 

There are similar fears of deterioration across Botswana and the wider region. Much of the country’s diverse ecosystem has been under threat from various development plans. Nearby Chobe National Park, for example, has seen a decline in river quality partly due to its burgeoning tourism industry, a study found. 

In the Cuvette-Centrale basin in Congo, a dense and ecologically thriving forest that’s home to the largest population of lowland gorillas, sections of the peatlands — the continent’s largest — went up for oil and gas auction last year. 

The Congolese government said the auctioning process “is in line” with development plans and government programs and it will stick to stringent international standards. 

Environmentalists are not convinced. 

Wes Sechrest, chief scientist of environmental organization Rewild, said that protecting areas “that have robust and healthy wildlife populations” like the Okavango Delta, “are a big part of the solution to the interconnected climate and biodiversity crises we’re facing.” 

The peatlands also serve as a carbon sink, storing large amounts of gas that would otherwise heat up the atmosphere. 

Sechrest added that “local communities are going to bear the heaviest costs of oil exploration” and “deserve to be properly consulted about any extractive industry projects, including the many likely environmental damages and decide if those projects are acceptable to them.” 

Steve Boyes, who led the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project that mapped the delta, said researchers now have even more data to support the need to maintain the wetlands. 

Aided by Kgetho and other locals whose “traditional wisdom and knowledge” led them through the bogs, Boyes and a team of 57 other scientists were able to detail around 1,600 square kilometers of peatlands. 

“These large-scale systems that have the ability to sequester tons of carbon are our long-term resilience plan,” said Boyes. 

For Kgetho, whose journey with the scientists was made into a documentary released earlier this year, there are more immediate reasons to defend the Okavango. 

“We must protect the delta,” Kgetho said. “It is our livelihood.” 
…

Last month, French journalist Olivier Dubois, who was held hostage in Mali for over a year, was finally released, but foreign and local journalists working in the Sahel tell VOA that press freedoms continue to be eroded in the region, making it more dangerous for those reporters who are still working.

In the past decade, five journalists have been killed and six have gone missing in the Sahel, a vast, semiarid region of western and north-central Africa that stretches along the Sahara desert’s southern rim from Senegal to Eritrea.

In 2013, French journalists Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon were kidnapped and killed by an armed insurgent group in Mali; in 2021, two Spanish journalists, David Beriain and cameraman Roberto Fraile, were attacked and killed by a terrorist group in Burkina Faso; in 2018, Malian journalist Birama Toure disappeared and likely died following torture by Mali’s intelligence agency, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Home to numerous violent Islamist extremists, the region suffers from political instability and sometimes regular coups, including two in Mali and Burkina Faso and one in Chad since 2020.

In some Sahel countries, journalists are persecuted by armed Islamist factions and ruling military juntas alike — the former abducting or killing reporters, the latter restricting press freedoms or conducting arbitrary arrests.

“We have seen the trends that after taking power, the military juntas have not hesitated to reshape the media landscape in order to better serve their interests,” said Sadibou Marong, sub-Saharan Africa director at Reporters Without Borders, which this week published a new report on the region. “This has been the case in Mali and Burkina Faso, where local broadcasting of several French media outlets has been suspended.”

While the release of Dubois after 711 days in captivity — the 48-year-old French freelancer had been held by al-Qaida-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin — is cause for celebration, Marong said threats to reporters covering the region are growing.

Contacted by VOA, Dubois’ wife, Deborah, said her husband, who was freed at the end of March, is not currently giving interviews.

An editor who has worked with Dubois, Sonia Delesalle-Stolper, told VOA the French newspaper she works for has been affected by the unrest across the Sahel.

“It’s been quite challenging over the last two years for Liberation and our coverage of the Sahel,” said Delesalle-Stolper, the newspaper’s chief foreign editor. “First of all, we had our correspondent in Mali, Olivier Dubois, who was taken hostage in April 2021 and has just been freed over the last two weeks … and the other correspondent who worked afterwards in Mali has decided recently to come back to France, because it has become too dangerous and there are too many threats towards freedom of press.”

Things aren’t much better in neighboring Burkina Faso, she added, noting that Liberation and Le Monde each saw a correspondent expelled from the country in recent days after publishing content perceived by leaders of its military junta as critical of the government.

“So it has become very difficult for the foreign press and Liberation, but as well for the press who have been working locally in Burkina, who are still there, and have more and more difficulties to cover what’s going on,” Delesalle-Stolper said.

Although Dubois has been freed, other local reporters who have been abducted haven’t been heard from since, the Reporters Without Borders report said. Among them are Malian radio journalist Moussa M’Bana Dicko, who was kidnapped in 2021, and Hamadoun Nialibouly, abducted in Mali in 2020.

Not in the field

Benin-based freelance journalist Flore Nobime says working in her country is also becoming more fraught.

“It is becoming more and more difficult for journalists to travel to the northern border areas of Benin to work because of the insecurity that now prevails there,” she told VOA. “We fear armed groups — and, on the other hand, it can turn into a nightmare when we come across the defense and security forces.”

Nobime was detained along with a Dutch reporter last year while reporting from the country’s northern region. Both were accused of espionage, and the foreign journalist was deported.

With so many restrictions on movement and threats to security, some journalists are opting to cover large parts of the Sahel from the various capitals or even from abroad.

Since last year, Mali has permanently suspended Radio France International (RFI) and France24, while Burkina Faso has banned their broadcasts.

David Bache, who worked in Mali as RFI’s correspondent for some four years, has been unable to acquire a Malian visa or press accreditation since early last year — prior to the RFI ban.

“It’s more difficult for the Malian colleagues who are in the country,” he told VOA. “The journalists who used to work for our broadcasts, for Radio France International and who were based in Mali, some of them have traveled and are now in another country.

“One of them is now in Senegal,” he added, “and other people are still in Mali but don’t work for us anymore because it’s too dangerous for them.”

In Mali itself, according to an RSF report, numerous local radio stations have been shuttered, reflecting a similar trend in Burkina Faso.

Bache says he uses his large network of contacts to continue reporting on Mali from Paris, but that it’s always better to be on the ground.

For many Sahel reporters, though, that remains too difficult and risky at the moment.
…

Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud announced Friday that his government has banned people from carrying weapons on the streets of Mogadishu, the country’s capital.

“We impose a strict ban on carrying guns in the streets of Mogadishu. One cannot justify having machine guns mounted on vehicles and rocket propelled grenades in the streets, for protection from a hiding al-Shabab militant armed with a pistol,” the president said.

The president announced the ban during a Friday prayers sermon held inside his presidential compound in Mogadishu.

He said flouting the ban would not be tolerated.

“We will fight against those who fail to abide by the measures,” he warned.

Mohamud has also banned traders from importing all kinds of military gear, from uniforms to boots to equipment.

“No businessman can bring any kind of military gear into the country, let alone weapons. The traders cannot even import Abdi Bile vehicles in the country,” the president said.

Abdi Bile is a local name for a Toyota pickup model named after a Somali American runner who won the 1987 World Championship 1,500-meter in Rome, and it is popular in Somalia for being the best to mount self-propelled anti-aircraft guns.

An effort to restore stability

Some security experts see the move as a big step in the process of restoring stability in Mogadishu, which has not had reliable security plans since the collapse of the Siad Barre military regime in 1991.

“Since the collapse of the military regime, there has not been a single reliable and effective security plan that helped the city’s stability. Now, banning weapons from the streets is a good sign forward,” said General Mohamed Farah Aliyow, a veteran Somali military general, and Toronto-based security analyst.

Mogadishu, a densely populated seaside capital, was known as the White Pearl of the Indian Ocean before the civil war.

Over the years, the business community has set up its own security teams to protect their lives and properties. Government officials and lawmakers also have their own heavily armed guards, and armed private security guards operate in the city, making the city awash with guns.

Guns and other small arms are still available for sale in some areas of the city, though not as openly as they were in the past.

Government goes after al-Shabab

Hours before the announcement of the weapons ban, government media declared that the second phase of the government’s war with al-Shabab militants has begun in the Central Somalia region of Hiran.

Last week, government officials said they ended an eight-month-long military operation against al-Shabab militants.

During military operations early Friday, the Somali National Army, backed by local clan militias, took control of several villages in the Hiran region from the militants.

“The liberated areas have been hideouts of al-Shabab militants, but not strong bases, we will pursue them to their strongholds in the West of Beledweyne town,” said Hiran regional governor Ali Jeyte Osman. “I told before and repeat again: al-Shabab fighters are cowards who can’t face the army and the locals.”

Osman said the army took over the villages of Berhano, Tarejento, Burdaar and Nuur-Fanah, located south of Beledweyne, which has been the center of local communities’ mobilizations against al-Shabab. Beledweyne is about 300 kilometers north of Mogadishu.

On March 25, Somalia’s Ministry of Information said that 3,000 al-Shabab militants had been killed and 3,700 more injured in the first phase of military operations from August 2022 through January 2023. The government also said 70 towns and villages had been liberated from al-Shabab.

Meanwhile, the militant group claimed that the first phase of military operations by the Somali government and local fighters had failed. There have never been independent sources confirming the claims of either side, especially the number of war casualties.

In an interview with VOA’s Somali Service this March, Hussein Sheikh Ali, the national security adviser for the Somali president, said the three neighboring countries — Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya — were to send new troops to support Somali forces against al-Shabab in the second phase of the military operations, but it is not known when these troops will arrive.

Abdiaziz Ahmed contributed to this report from Mogadishu.
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Activists in Uganda are welcoming the rare prosecution of a government minister on corruption charges but are skeptical that other high-level officials will be charged in the scandal. 

Karamoja Affairs Minister Mary Goretti Kitutu was charged Thursday with fraud and causing loss of public property in the theft of thousands of metal roofing sheets meant for poor residents in her community. She will remain in jail over the holiday weekend and was expected to remain in custody until her next court appearance Wednesday.

Uganda’s public prosecutor said other ministers implicated in the scheme would be held accountable.

The prosecutor’s office said Kitutu, her younger brother and Joshua Abaho, a senior assistant secretary in the same ministry who was reported to be on the run, had diverted roofing meant for beneficiaries under the Karamoja community empowerment program. Karamoja is the least developed part of Uganda, with hundreds of thousands still living in mud-thatched houses known as manyattas.

The prosecution of government ministers for corruption is rare in Uganda, where theft and misuse of public funds and materials is routine. As investigations into the scandal continue, nine other ministers, including executive members of the government such as the vice president, the speaker of parliament and the prime minister, are potential suspects.

Marlon Agaba, with the Anti-Corruption Coalition of Uganda, told VOA he doubted the remaining ministers would be held accountable.

‘Sacrificial lamb’

“In a way, she has been given in as a sacrificial lamb,” Agaba said of Kitutu. “That doesn’t take away her culpability. It has happened before, where probably one person or two are taken to court and the others go away scot-free. So to me, it’s not surprising at all. But we also need to know that, yes, she has been taken to court, [but] it’s not time for rejoicing yet, because in the country where we are, we don’t have a history of convicting actually the ministers.”

The vice president and the prime minister have publicly stated that Kitutu gave them the roofing sheets. Agaba said those were flimsy excuses. 

“If you’re a prime minister or a speaker or whatever and the minister of Karamoja is giving you iron sheets, you think those iron sheets are coming from where?” he said. “They knew that these iron sheets were for the people of Karamoja. Because even information came out showing that they even discussed on WhatsApp and other platforms and agreed how they were going to share these iron sheets.”

The Committee on Presidential Affairs in Uganda’s parliament is conducting a separate probe. Legislator Jacob Karubanga told VOA those who benefited from the diverted roofing sheets should not have received what belonged to Karamoja.

“If anybody diverted iron sheets meant for a particular group, that was wrong,” he said. “But to what extent it is wrong is the problem. Because on the other hand, those who received the iron sheets, in any case, are also vulnerable.  But it was not meant for those particular vulnerables who received them. [The sheets that Kitutu gave out] should have been delivered to the originally identified vulnerables in Karamoja.”

Jacquelyn Okui, spokesperson for the Director of Public Prosecutions, said the case was getting the attention it deserved.  When asked by VOA if Kitutu was being used as a scapegoat in the scandal. Okui said, “No, it’s just a process. You see, the iron sheets scandal is, I would say, like a big elephant. So it’s been decided that it be handled piecemeal. There are other cases filed for other suspects, which are still being investigated.”
…

A new report by researchers from Johns Hopkins University is giving China better than expected marks for its performance in helping to restructure the crippling debt loads carried by some African countries.

The report is based on a detailed evaluation of Beijing’s participation in the Debt Service Suspension Initiative, or DSSI, an international vehicle for developed nations to support struggling countries like Angola and Zambia.

The DSSI was introduced in 2020 at the start of the global pandemic by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which suggested the world’s 20 largest economies, known as the G-20, temporarily halt the collection of loans from the world’s poorest nations.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and World Bank Chief David Malpass have recently accused China of being a barrier to debt relief, and U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was in default-stricken Zambia last week urging the country’s bilateral creditors — of which China is the biggest — to do more on restructuring Zambia’s debt.

But, despite some caveats, the report released this week by Deborah Brautigam and Yufan Huang from the China Africa Research Initiative found that overall, China “fulfilled its role fairly well as a responsible G-20 stakeholder.”

The analysts added that China “did implement the minimum steps of the DSSI fairly well, communicating with other players, and following through on pledges.”

According to the available data, Chinese creditors accounted for 30 percent of all claims and contributed 63 percent of debt service suspensions in the countries that participated in the DSSI.

“The metric by which you evaluate [China’s] performance depends on what your expectations were for the initiative,” Brautigam told VOA, noting that this was the first time the world’s second-largest economy had joined a multilateral initiative – a move one G-20 source called “miraculous.”

Brautigam said it was obvious that a new architecture is needed to deal with debt relief because the current system is dominated by the Paris Club, a group of wealthy Western nations that started lending to developing countries in 1956. In recent years, there have been more major new creditors, like China and bondholders.

“So what evolves out of this is really up in the air,” she said, adding that all lenders “need to be in together because otherwise you get all these suspicions, you know, worries about free riding.”

Successes and failures

The study concluded that China might have achieved more during the DSSI if not for fears that countries would simply take advantage of any debt relief to repay other creditors.

In Zambia, for example, Chinese creditors wanted assurances their relief wouldn’t be used to pay off the bondholders, while the bondholders were concerned that any relief from their side might go toward paying off China.

China was “totally justified” in its suspicions on this front, Brautigam said, because “in most countries, all of those creditors continued to be paid.”

“We need something that is simultaneous – you know, they all need to be in the room together … so that we don’t have this first-mover problem,” she added.

In Zambia, the Chinese decided against suspending their debt payments while the country was still paying bondholders, but this didn’t happen in Angola, China’s largest African borrower with around $20 billion in debt to Chinese entities. In that case, Chinese creditors provided 97% of the debt relief over the two-year period without asking for assurances that Angola wouldn’t continue making other repayments.

The researcher’s third African case study, Kenya, showed how China’s DSSI treatment was different from the other two. Chinese banks agreed to provide relief at first but later stopped loan disbursements and suspended only some 40 percent of the expected amount in 2021.

Moving forward

The study also showed how China’s banks and central government, despite the country’s top-down political structure, do not always act in unison. The fragmented nature of the Chinese system and bureaucratic hurdles often remain a barrier to debt relief.

Being part of the DSSI helped address that because it “pushed the Chinese government to align interests among fragmented banks and bureaucracies with conflicting goals. This process, still under way, is a necessary step toward full acceptance of the necessity for debt restructuring in the post-pandemic era,” the researchers found.

The DSSI ended in December 2021 and has been superseded by what’s known as the Common Framework to continue helping indebted countries like Zambia with their restructuring.

In January, World Bank chief Malpass said, “China is asking lots of questions in the creditors’ committees, and that causes delays, that strings out the process.” Last month, Yellen accused Beijing of leaving developing countries “trapped in debt.”

China has called on the IMF and World Bank to also offer debt relief, with President Xi Jinping saying at the G-20 summit last year: “International financial institutions and commercial creditors, which are the main creditors of developing countries, should take part in the debt reduction and suspension for developing countries.”

The Chinese Embassy in Zambia hit back at the U.S., calling Yellen’s “debt trap” comments “irresponsible and unreasonable.”

Ultimately, the study found, “the DSSI was a success in what some saw as its primary goal: to bring China into a multilateral, G20-supervised forum where Beijing has an equal voice.”

It now remains to be seen how the challenges highlighted by the pandemic relief program spill over into the current debt negotiations.
…

A regional military force deployed to stabilize conflict-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is raising suspicions about the role neighboring countries are playing.

Dozens of armed groups plague eastern DRC, a legacy of regional wars that raged in the 1990s and 2000s.

One group, the M23, has wreaked havoc since re-emerging from dormancy in late 2021.

The M23 rebels, who are allegedly backed by Rwanda, have captured swaths of territory in North Kivu province and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

The seven-nation East African Community (EAC) decided to create a military force to respond to the crisis last June.

Kenyan soldiers deployed in November, followed in recent weeks by Burundian, Ugandan and South Sudanese contingents.

The total size of the EAC force is unclear, but the troops are entering areas previously occupied by the M23 and are intended to supervise a rebel withdrawal.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said last week his troops were a “neutral force” that would not fight the M23.

The array of foreign troops, and particularly Ugandan ones, is raising suspicions in some quarters in the DRC.

Denis Mukwege, the Congolese doctor who won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for assisting rape victims in the region, recently tweeted that the EAC force is composed of “destabilizing states,” for example.

Congolese MPs also recently asked the defense and foreign affairs ministers for clarifications about the EAC force, and in particular the role of Ugandan troops.

Uganda has a history of interference in eastern Congo. Many are also suspicious of Uganda’s role in the M23 crisis.

According to a report in December by independent United Nations experts, the Ugandan government appeared to have turned a blind eye to M23 fighters moving back and forth over the Ugandan-DRC border, for example.

‘Balkanization’

Congolese government spokesman Patrick Muyaya acknowledged “apprehensions” surrounding the EAC force during a press briefing on Monday evening.

But he stressed that EAC troops had been deployed as part of a regional push to de-escalate the crisis, and at the invitation of the Congolese government.

“This must not be viewed as ‘balkanization,’” Muyaya said, referring to the division of a country into smaller states.

Since Saturday, M23 fighters have withdrawn from several villages and towns in North Kivu, according to residents interviewed by AFP.

The M23 first came to international prominence in 2012, when it briefly captured North Kivu’s capital, Goma, before being driven out and going to ground.

But the Tutsi-led group re-emerged in late 2021, claiming that the Congolese government had ignored a pledge to integrate its fighters into the army.

The DRC, as well as the United States, other Western countries and independent U.N. experts, accuses Rwanda of backing the M23, although Kigali denies this.

The M23 claims to defend marginalized groups in eastern DRC and has consistently called for negotiations with the government.
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