WEST AFRICA : IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 431 for 07 - 13 June 2008

DAKAR , 13 June 2008 (IRIN) - CONTENTS

CHAD: Rebels seen moving again in east
SAHEL: Outbreak of polio prompts mass vaccination campaign
GAMBIA: Mob violence feared after President’s gay beheading threat
GHANA: Nationally-run school feeding programme mired in corruption
MALI: Gun running worsening
MALI: Religious leaders oppose abolition of death penalty
MALI: Teacher strikes may mean ‘blank’ school year
GLOBAL: Beneficiary feedback: “thanks but no thanks”?
SAHEL: Voices from the frontline of climate change
GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea’s bauxite industry
SAHEL: Jan Egeland's Sahel climate change diary - Day 5

CHAD: Rebels seen moving again in east

Two columns of armed fighters are moving close to areas where aid operations are ongoing in eastern Chad, aid workers in the area said on 13 June. “The local authorities have already run away from Goz Beida town,” an aid worker based in Goz Beida told IRIN by telephone. MALI: All it takes to save the lakes from climate change is money

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78744

SAHEL: Outbreak of polio prompts mass vaccination campaign

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the governments of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali are launching a cross-border polio vaccination campaign today following an April 2008 report of a polio case at Tillabéry in southwest Niger, 100km from the borders of Mali and Burkina Faso.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78740

GAMBIA: Mob violence and murder feared after President’s gay beheading threat

President of The Gambia Yahya Jammeh, who in mid-May reportedly threatened to expel or behead lesbian and gay people the country, should fully retract his comments, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to the President on 10 June. President Jammeh has retracted his threat to kill homosexual people, but not the threat to expel them, the HRW statement said. His comments, which HRW says were made in a speech in May, “encourage hatred… [and] contribute to a climate in which basic rights can be assaulted with impunity”. Scott Long, director of HRW’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Programme said: “It is very dangerous when political leaders turn to homophobic statements to try to drum up political support. When statements like this are made, violence often follows – sometimes immediately and sometimes further down the line. It makes people think these are people that it is safe to attack.”

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78716

GHANA: Nationally-run school feeding programme mired in corruption

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) has been successfully running school feeding programmes around the world for years. But in Ghana the lead partners are the Ghanaian government and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), not the international community or non-governmental organisations. Ghana became one of ten countries in Africa which included Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Zambia selected by NEPAD to implement domestically-run school feeding programmes on a pilot basis in 2005. The next year the programme started in earnest with the goals of reducing hunger and malnutrition, and increasing school enrolment, attendance and retention; as well as boosting domestic food production. As a result of the programme, school attendance has increased, but an independent audit commissioned by the Dutch government recently revealed that the programme is mired in corruption. Among other things the report cites the award of contracts to non-existent companies, the disappearance of funds allocated to programme management, and the deliberate purchase of unwholesome but cheaper ingredients.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78707

MALI: Gun running worsening

Mali has become an established transit route for weapons heading from West Africa’s increasingly peaceful coastal states to active conflicts in West and Central Africa, an ECOWAS expert has warned. “There are two factors on the supply side – stabilisation in Cote d’Ivoire and in Guinea Conakry,” said Jonathan Sandy, small arms programme manager with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Bamako, who says regional monitoring has shown a steady uptick in the number of guns entering Mali over the last five years. “On the demand side, some of the weapons stay in Mali and are used for criminality. Others go to active conflicts in the north of Mali, in Niger, Chad and even as far away as Sudan,” he said.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78701

MALI: Religious leaders oppose abolition of death penalty

A new bill to abolish the death penalty is sparking hot debate in the National Assembly amid protests from Islamic groups who say abolishing it goes against Islamic principles. “Our recommendations focus on maintaining the death penalty in conformity with Islamic principles,” said Boubacar Camara, an Imam and a member of the High Islamic Council of Mali (HCIM). “The Islamic Council refuses to endorse a legal decision that is fundamentally opposed to what God and His Prophet have decreed.” If passed by the National Assembly the President would initiate a process to amend all other laws referring to the death penalty, including the penal code.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78693

MALI: Teacher strikes may mean ‘blank’ school year

In Mali the most important exams come last: the baccalaureate at the end of June. But this year, with secondary-school teachers in their seventh straight month of strikes, the exam risks going unmarked, meaning students may face a blank school year. That is making many of them angry. Secondary school teachers have refused to invigilate or mark any secondary school exams. While the government sent in emergency invigilators from the national teaching academy to monitor the exams which began in late May, these invigilators are not qualified to mark them. “It is time for the arm-wrestling between the government and teachers to stop. Our future of is at stake,” said Mohamed Ibrahim Baby, secretary-general of the Association of Malian students (EMEA). “How can we study throughout the school year yet not have our exams marked?”

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78679

GLOBAL: Beneficiary feedback: “thanks but no thanks”?

'Participation', 'rights-based' and 'consultative' are all terms associated with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as the paradigm for humanitarian aid has shifted from agencies thinking they know best, to trying to put affected people at the heart of their aid responses. But when push comes to shove, and beneficiaries are unhappy with what they receive, do NGOs listen? And if so, how? "There is still a huge gap between rhetoric and reality when it comes to beneficiaries actively taking part in informing agencies what their needs are, evaluating if and how they are being met, and how or if projects have changed their lives," said an aid analyst. "When things are not going well, often no one hears about it."

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78640

Voices from the frontline of climate change

People living in the Sahelian band of West Africa are among those worst affected by shifting patterns of rainfall and desertification in the world, the UN says. IRIN asked five people near Timbuktu in northern Mali what climate change means for them, and these are their replies. “We don’t talk about climate change here, we talk about how we are lacking water and food. There is so little water and the community cannot support everyone. The nomads left long ago mostly to go to Mopti. Some stayed but either their herds got smaller or they just settled in villages.”

http://www.irinnews.org/HOVReport.aspx?ReportId=78644

GUINEA: Winners and losers in Guinea’s bauxite industry

With half of the world’s known bauxite reserves, Guinea’s mining sector is seen as the country’s most important engine of growth. But some civil society groups fear the hundreds of thousands of dollars companies should be paying in taxes to support development in villages on mined land does not always get through to the right people.

“Companies have been mining here for 36 years and we have never once in that time received taxes from them for using our land,” said Helage Suriba Sylla, president of the rural development committee (CRD) which regulates community development in Mambia, which lies in Kindia prefecture, 80 km from the capital Conakry. “Rather than making people richer, mining has made them poorer,” said Akoumba Diallo, a mining sector researcher. “It polluted their environments so they can’t grow crops or let animals feed near mining sites. And it is hard to get water anywhere because it’s contaminated.”

With mining contributing to 85 percent of the country’s external revenue, and the World Bank estimating investments of up to US$20 billion in bauxite mining in Guinea over the next decade, the government is currently rewriting and renegotiating its mining contracts - unchanged for 25 years - with 15 companies to ensure Guineans are more likely to benefit from the wealth they spawn.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78653

SAHEL: Jan Egeland's Sahel climate change diary - Day 5

When I embarked on this mission I think there were those who asked why a Special Adviser on Conflict Prevention should go on a trip to see climate change and environmental disasters. Well, this trip has convinced me that there is a very clear link between climate induced resource competition and conflict, and I will be using what I have seen here to convince sceptics ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009.
Today we visited what was once Lake Chad in eastern Niger, which as recently as the 1960s covered a total 25,000 sq km, of which 4,000 sq km were inside Niger. Since the droughts that have been recurrent since the 1970s the lake has now has shrunk to nothing inside Niger. This is a very dramatic environmental crisis, with enormous consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. For me the visit was epitomised by an old customs boat which is now stranded in the middle of the desert, a desert covered in sea shells. Next to the boat I visited an old fishing village where the fishermen no longer have a lake to fish in and have instead tried to make it as farmers harvesting meagre crops of millet and beans to keep their families alive.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78626