All eyes on Libya

It’s been a rollercoaster few weeks for Libya. A spot of good news first: Libya is pumping oil at its highest rate in four years, an important boon for a country that relies heavily on the petroleum industry. Now for a bunch of bad: This week, a convoy from the UN Support Mission in Libya was ambushed and, according to reports, their staff taken at gunpoint. The UN now says its staff are all safely in Tripoli, but the incident is yet another a sign of the chaos in Libya, where multiple forces claim authority and there is heavy fighting in some parts of the country, including Benghazi. The UN has just appointed a new envoy to the country � a former Lebanese minister of culture � a process that took four months, after the US rejected a Palestinian appointee because of his nationality, followed by retaliatory objections to other candidates from Russia and other countries. UNISMIL and various UN agencies have been gradually increasing their presence on the ground in the dangerous country, but this week’s ambush is likely to be a major setback. And with Italy threatening to deny entry to foreign ships docking on its shores � an effort to force its European partners to do more about the massive influx of migrants, mostly coming from Libya � the internal divisions and external debate over Libya make it one to watch.

Au revoir UNOCI

While it’s something to celebrate, the closure today of the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Cote d’Ivoire (UNOCI) has also generated some concerns. Although Cote d’Ivoire is one of Africa’s fastest growing economies, two mutinies this year by disgruntled soldiers suggests it has not fully healed from the 2002-2003 civil war and the post-election violence of 2010-2011. Human Rights Watch has called on the Ivorian government to address the rights issues at the root of past political violence, including the problem of impunity and the need to professionalise its security forces. It also pointed to the incomplete national reconciliation process and continued competition over land as potential flashpoints. With the peacekeepers’ withdrawal, a UN Security Council briefing noted the need for the international community to stay engaged. In a statement to the council, Sweden said the closure of UNOCI meant the UN presence in the country is facing a ‘financial cliff’. This risks undermining the sustainability of the gains achieved.

Is Afghanistan pulling Central Asia into chaos?

That’s the question at the heart of this new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. While Afghanistan’s downward spiral has been plotted meticulously by journalists and analysts, Central Asian states are often overlooked � to our potential peril, according to CSIS. The report notes that security has taken a nosedive throughout in Afghanistan in the past couple years, but asserts: In the provinces of Afghanistan adjacent to Central Asia, the security situation has deteriorated even further than in Afghanistan as a whole on average. That situation presents huge challenges to Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, which could become destabilized by smuggling, Taliban attacks and infiltration by extremists, among other threats. The report suggests some measures Afghanistan and its neighbours can take to mitigate those risks � including sealing borders and negotiating with the Taliban � but of none of them would be easy.

Seven more years

Few African leaders divide international public opinion as much as Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who will run for a third term in office in August, having overwhelmingly won a referendum to change the constitution in 2015. Kagame’s champions see him as the architect of stability and growth in a country where some 20 percent of the population was slaughtered in the 1994 genocide. They point to free basic education for all, the halving of infant and maternal mortality, and the emergence of a vibrant economy as achievements which merit his re-election. Detractors say Kagame’s authoritarian style and intolerance of opposition � some of whose leaders have been killed or disappeared, others accused of the cardinal sin of genocidal ideology � is a threat to democracy itself. Further evidence of this came in May, when politicians were told that all social media or online campaign content had to vetted by the National Electoral Commission 48 hours before publication. This rule was shelved a month later in the wake of domestic and international pressure, but the attempt to control the messaging will not be forgotten. Still, Kagame’s re-election is pretty much a foregone conclusion: he won with more than 95 percent in 2003 and 93 percent in 2010. Rwanda’s is one of four key African elections being held this year: the people of Kenya and Angola will also go to the polls in August, while Liberians will follow suit in October.

Did you miss it?

Lifting the lid on a Mozambique’s loan scandal

As scandals go, Mozambique’s $2.2 billion secret loan deal that crashed its economy was pretty bad (See IRIN’s report). But now we’re getting a handle on just how corrupt it all was. The recently-released executive summary of the Kroll audit report suggests that the Privinest Group � which was supposed to supply Mozambique with a tuna fishing fleet and maritime security vessels � overcharged by at least $700 million. For example, fishing boats were invoiced at $22 million each, but Kroll estimates the real price should have been just $2 million. And there’s more. Kroll says that $500 million remains unaudited and unexplained, on top of the $700 million overcharge. That’s partly because Privinest as well as the state security service, SISE, local banks and the Ministry of Finance all refused to provide the auditors with information requested. For more on the scandal, for which Mozambicans are being forced to pay the price as the economy totters and social services are scaled back, check out Mozambique News reports & clippings.

The unpromised land

Few places these days can be described as hospitable towards asylum seekers, but in recent years Israel has outdone most other states with its policies of deterrence and detention. Not content with keeping asylum seekers confined to so-called open detention facilities like Holot, starting in 2014, the authorities began offering one-way tickets to safe third countries in Africa. By the time IRIN reported on these voluntary deportations in April 2015, it was already clear that those who accepted the offer to go to Uganda or Rwanda, the two countries that had quietly stepped up to receive Israel’s unwanted asylum seekers, did not fare much better than those who opted to remain at Holot. This week, a year-long investigation into Israel’s relocation process by Andrew Green for Foreign Policy revealed that the vast majority of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers who are sent to Uganda and Rwanda from Israel are quickly smuggled into neighbouring countries where they have even less protection and live in undocumented limbo. Meanwhile, Ugandan and Rwandan officials continue to deny having made any agreement with Israel to receive asylum seekers.

Watch out for an upcoming IRIN film � Unwelcome Stranger – about the life of a Sudanese asylum seeker in Israel.

Source: IRIN

KAMPALA � Cooks at a community kitchen in Kampala’s Nakasero Hill business district are preparing a traditional breakfast of green bananas in offal sauce using a very untraditional means of cooking – volcanic rocks.

It’s a method that some are hoping will take off across Africa, to help protect forests and improve the lives of women.

“Rocks for fuel is a reprieve to all women in Africa,” said Susan Bamugamire, one of the 55 cooks in the community kitchen set up by city authorities in the Wandegeya Market shopping mall to help feed local workers.

“Save for the high cost of purchasing and installing it, the special cookstove is something every woman will crave to have in her kitchen,” she said, saying it would largely free women from having to seek out firewood, charcoal or kerosene.

But cost is an issue in a country where a third of the population live on $1.90 or less a day and even small domestic stoves are priced at $100.

The stoves use heat-holding volcanic rocks broken down to the size of charcoal. The rocks are heated using starter briquettes and then remain hot for hours with the help a fan blowing a continuous flow of air over them.

According to Rose Twine, the director of Eco Group Limited – the Kampala-based company that produces the stoves – the main aim is to provide an efficient form of cooking energy that is user friendly and good for the environment.

“It pains me when I see people cut down trees, some of them indigenous and decades old, just for the sake of making charcoal or firewood,” said Twine.

“It is now good that we can talk of an alternative,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The volcanic rocks can be repeatedly heated for up to two years with the aid of the fan, which is solar-powered and needs very little energy. Any surplus solar power produced can be used to light the house, run a radio and charge mobile phones, Twine said.

Alternatively, the fan can be run off mains electricity if the owner’s home or business is connected to the power grid, she said.

It is the cost of the fan, battery and solar panel that push up the stove’s production cost, pushing it out of reach of most people in Uganda.

“We can only achieve the environmental benefits of these stoves if they are made affordable for poor Ugandans who desperately need them,” said David Illukol, a senior mechanical research engineer at the government-run Uganda Industrial Research Institute.

“All we need is further research on how to reduce the costs of production, and perhaps [on] maintaining them,” the engineer said in an interview.

Despite the cost, more than 4,500 individuals and institutions in Uganda – including schools – are now using the stoves, according to Eco Group Limited.

The Kampala city authority has installed 230 of the stoves at Wandegeya Market where Bamugamire and her colleagues rent the premises from the government.

Protecting Trees

There are plans for the stoves to be used in other parts of the continent too.

Twine’s company began exporting them to Rwanda this year, and plans to take them to Kenya and Somalia as well.

An umbrella group of more than 1,000 climate organizations and networks – the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance – wants to spread the cooking method across Africa, according to its secretary general Mithika Mwenda.

Volcanic rocks have the potential to become a key cooking method for East Africa and perhaps the entire continent, engineer Illukol said.

They are a largely environmentally friendly form of cooking because – unlike charcoal, kerosene, gas and firewood – they do not emit climate-changing gases and produce no smoke at all, he said.

About 94 percent of Ugandan households use firewood or charcoal for cooking, according to the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.

Only 20 percent of households had access to electricity in 2014, and most of those connected to the grid rarely use electricity for cooking because of the high costs involved, the statics bureau said.

Demand for wood for fuel has put pressure on Uganda’s shrinking forests.

The country had some 3 million hectares of tropical forests under government control at the beginning of the 20th century.

But by 1999, tropical forest cover had fallen to about 730,000 hectares or 3.6 percent of Uganda’s land area, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

“If we can stop using firewood and charcoal completely, then we will have saved a huge volume of wood that is used for fuel every year, and that is good for our environment,” said Illukol.

Source: Voice of America