South Africa gang violence shuts Cape Town schools

Some areas of Cape Town have suffered increasing violence related to gangs

A surge in gang violence has prompted education officials in South Africa's Western Cape Province to close 16 schools for two days.

At least 50 people are reported to have been wounded or killed after being shot in areas of Cape Town's Manenberg suburb in recent weeks.

Provincial Premier Helen Zille has asked the national government to send in the army to help overwhelmed police.

A caretaker at one of the schools died after being shot a number of weeks ago.

A stray bullet from gang violence hit a primary school at about that time as well.

The decision to close the schools was made after teachers said they fear for their safety, Western Cape Province Education Ministry spokeswoman Bronagh Casey told the Associated Press news agency.

Aysha Ismail, mother of one of the victims, called for a greater police presence in Manenberg, to try to bring down the levels of violence.

Ms Ismail said her son was shot in an area where children play every day. Fellow members said he was a part of the gang called the Americans.

Togo: Ruling Party's Win May Choke Togo Reforms

Lome — Togo's July legislative polls extended the dominance of President Faure Gnassingbé's party, which has been in power since 1967, despite opposition claims of malpractice. These results could narrow the chances for reforms and presage the results of the 2015 presidential election, analysts say.

The ruling Union for the Republic (UNIR) party broadened its parliamentary majority, winning 62 of 91 seats in the 25 July vote, which had been repeatedly postponed. The often divided opposition cried foul, but the constitutional court confirmed the outcome.

The small West African country has seen persistent protests since Gnassingbé's 2010 re-election - which the opposition also said was flawed - and an increase in political violence. Last year, security forces clamped down on a series of opposition demonstrations.

"The ruling party's majority win re-emphasizes, one time too many, the overwhelming grip of the Gnassingbé family in Togo," said Kamissa Camara, a West Africa political analyst.

The Gnassingbé family has "consolidated power through manipulation, corruption schemes, terror, etc... and have managed to control key institutions, which should in practice be totally independent from the state. This has created a totally biased and unfair democratic playing field, which translates into the way the country is run," Camara told IRN.

Opposition fears

Gnassingbé came to power in 2005 following the death of his father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, who had ruled Togo for 38 years. The army-backed succession sparked deadly unrest and international condemnation that forced him to step down and call elections, which he then won.

An ensuing political tension necessitated dialogue between the opposition and the ruling party, which resulted in a broad political accord that included a consultative platform for political and other reforms as well as a truth commission over the poll violence and other past atrocities. Most of the truth commission's recommendations have not yet been implemented.

"The ruling party's victory is merely a sign of continuity. I don't believe it adds anything to the country's democracy. There is no progress for Togo's democracy, and the election disputes only add to the country's fragility," said Aimé Tchamie, Amnesty International's director in Togo.

Opposition coalition Let's Save Togo ('Collectif Sauvons le Togo' - CST), which won 19 seats in last month's elections, and other groups led protests in 2012 to press for reforms, key among them a presidential term limit as well as electoral and other institutional changes.

Days to the July elections, the opposition and the government reached a deal that included opposition representation in the electoral body, party funding and the release of detained opposition members, but the accord came too late to have a meaningful effect on the opposition's electoral chances.

"The strategy of going for elections first and later undertak[ing] constitutional and institutional reforms, as called for in the 2006 political agreement, leads one to believe that the government is taking advantage of [the] parliamentary majority to block reforms it doesn't like," said Magloire Kuami Kuakuvi, a Togolese academic and human rights specialist.

"Redrawing the voting zones is the minimum of reforms before legislative polls. It is ironic that with just 70,000 votes, UNIR won 62 seats against 25 taken by the CST and Arc-en-ciel [another opposition group] combined," Kuakuvi explained.

Amnesty International's Tchamie noted that Lomé, the capital city, is home to a fifth of the country's six million people and has 10 deputies while certain upcountry constituencies with 50,000 people have three members of parliament.

"With 62 [ruling party] members, it will be difficult to adopt constitutional reforms because the president will want to consolidate power with this majority. That is what is likely," Michel Goeh-Akué, a lecturer at the University of Lomé, told IRIN.

Togo has no presidential term limits and the president is elected in a single round of voting with no run-off - a provision that makes it possible to be elected even without garnering the majority.

"A series of constitutional and institutional reforms are indeed needed for Togo to join the cohort of democratic states," Camara said. "The July legislative elections basically shattered all hopes for serious constitutional and institutional reforms to take place within the short-to-medium terms."

She argued that Gnassingbé remains the strongest candidate for the 2015 presidential race. "It will be quasi-impossible for another candidate to be elected to the presidency. Indeed, Faure has not shown any indication that he would be willing to step down and let the elections take place without him."

Rights abuses

Human rights groups and other observers have also denouncedviolations of freedoms such as arbitrary arrests, widespread torture, and restrictions on political gatherings and the right to free expression.

"UNIR's parliamentary majority is not very reassuring for press freedom in Togo. This government was repressive and voted laws that curbed liberties," said Maxime Domégn, the secretary general of Togo's independent journalists' union, citing the raiding and closure of a private radio station on 25 July.

Tchamie said: "We remain concerned about human rights in Togo. Many opposition leaders are still in detention."

The analysts called for a stronger engagement by the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS) in Togo to help implement reforms agreed in 2006.

"We are worried that this [political] tension may persist up to the 2015 elections. International actors should not wait up to 2014 to help start a political dialogue [between the opposition and the ruling party]," said Tchamie.

"For democratic development and progress to occur, actors need to be renewed on a regular basis. The Togolese regime is a dilapidated one. I believe the ECOWAS involvement in the Togolese decade-long political crisis has been so far very timid and could certainly become more forceful," Camara noted.

West Africa: Where Navies Are Not Enough - Fighting Piracy in the Gulf of Guinea

ANALYSIS

Johnny Depp may be the best-known pirate in theatres, and Somali pirates remain dangerous in the Indian Ocean, but the pirates causing oil companies and Lloyds of London sleepless nights are raiding ships in Africa's Gulf of Guinea that carry near 30 per cent of all U.S. oil imports.

In the first half of 2013, the London based International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Centre recorded three times more incidents in the Gulf of Guinea than off the Somali coast. The area of operations was widened on 15 July, when in the latest raid pirates seized a Turkish tanker off the coast of Gabon.

The Gulf of Guinea is vast, nearly equal to the Gulf of Mexico, and the shipping lifeline for a dozen nations, ranging from tiny São Tomé and Príncipé to the continent's most populous, Nigeria, and geographically second largest, the Democratic Republic of Congo. As the primary access route to and from major oil-producing countries Angola and Nigeria, it is critical to international shipping, and its already dense tanker traffic will only increase due to recent discoveries of offshore oil in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Liberia.

The U.S. first grasped the strategic value of the Gulf of Guinea in the early 2000s, when, as part of a new African oil policy, the Bush administration boosted naval forces there to protect the investment of its oil companies. As piracy began to rise, Washington and its international partners launched maritime security cooperation programs that provide ships and equipment to African navies.

Today, American, British and French navies also occasionally patrol, and this summer the African regional countries are launching a new initiative to cope with the growing threat. The heads of the Gulf of Guinea states resolved in June to take collective action. The leaders agreed on a code of conduct for sharing information and committed to build a maritime regional security center in Cameroon. A special conference in Nigeria last month carried this forward, and more regional meetings are planned.

This is all to the good but insufficient. The approach depends heavily on navies, but warships cannot provide the full answer. Giving African countries naval assistance and deploying international naval operations can help to contain the problem but not solve it. The navy-heavy strategy has been partly responsible for improvements off Somalia, but the Gulf of Guinea has a different political and operational context.

Somali pirates hijack ships for ransom, mostly on the high seas; Gulf of Guinea pirates focus on stealing cargoes and siphoning fuel, mostly in territorial waters, close to shore, meaning less reaction time for naval vessels, especially from third countries. Also, the rise of Somali piracy is mainly the consequence of state collapse. A main driver of piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, however, is the regional oil black market.

The strategy applied in the Gulf of Guinea should be regionally owned, but if it is to be successful, it should not be narrowly focused on military solutions. The U.S., with its strong stake in trouble-free oil transport, should move quickly to support the African initiative, while encouraging its shift to a more comprehensive, multilateral approach.

In developing this new strategy, the U.S. can work with its allies already active in the Gulf of Guinea, in particular France, which has elaborated its own broad cooperation approach to strengthen capacity of all agencies (military and civilian) involved in maritime governance.

Gulf of Guinea piracy is above all an organized crime problem. Ships will never be safe until authorities strengthen police capacity to investigate and prosecute criminal networks, as well as enforce a zero tolerance policy for corruption in security services. The Niger delta is the pirate gangs' center, so the U.S. should make this policing approach a core of its security cooperation with Nigeria.

There will be no overnight transformation. The piracy has deep roots in the Gulf states' weak governance as well as limited law enforcement capacity. The regional oil black market is itself a product of structural problems within West African states. Poverty, socio-political tensions and conflicts between communities for control over resources all contribute to regional vulnerability.

Unless Washington presses for improvement of oil sector governance and development in the coastal states at the same time as it focuses resources on regional safety and security, however, piracy and other organised crime will continue to plague the Gulf of Guinea, raise energy prices in the U.S. and other markets and lead to further destabilization in an already fragile part of the world. (748 words)

Mark Schneider is Senior Vice President and Thierry Vircoulon the Central Africa Project Director of the International Crisis Group. Read more in the ICG's report, "The Gulf of Guinea: The New Danger Zone".

MSF closes operations in Somalia over 'extreme attacks'

MSF said 16 members of its staff had been killed since 1991

Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) is closing all its programmes in Somalia after 22 years working in the war-torn country.

It said in a statement that the decision had been taken because of "extreme attacks on its staff".

It said armed groups and civilian leaders increasingly "support, tolerate or condone the killing, assaulting, and abducting of humanitarian aid workers".

More than 1,500 staff have provided a range of services across Somalia.

The BBC's international development correspondent Mark Doyle says in many parts of Somalia the charity is the only provider of health care ranging from basic medical supplies to major surgery.

The move to close down operations completely is a shock because MSF has always been famous among the major charities as the one that would tolerate most risks to deliver aid, he says.

'Countless lives'

Unni Karunakara, MSF's international president, said leaving Somalia had been one of the hardest decisions MSF had ever had to make.

Since 1991, when Somalia descended into civil war, 16 MSF workers have been killed and there had been dozens of attacks on its staff, ambulances and medical facilities, the charity said.

Last month, two of its Spanish members of staff who were kidnapped from a Kenyan camp for Somali refugees and held captive in Somalia for nearly two years were freed.

"Ultimately, civilians in Somalia will pay the highest cost," Dr Karunakara said in a statement.

"Much of the Somali population has never known the country without war or famine," he said.

"In choosing to kill, attack, and abduct humanitarian aid workers, these armed groups, and the civilian authorities who tolerate their actions, have sealed the fate of countless lives in Somalia."

Correspondents say this will be a blow to the government of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, which has been trying to build on the improving security in the capital, Mogadishu, in the last two years.

Some 18,000 African Union troops are in the country supporting his administration - the first one in more than two decades to be recognised by the US and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The Islamist al-Shabab militant group no longer has bases in Mogadishu and has also been pushed out of other cities.

But it remains in control of smaller towns and large swathes of the countryside in central and southern Somalia and continues to launch occasional suicide attacks.

The improving security situation has prompted the return of diaspora Somalis and allowed UN agencies and foreign embassies to reopen.

However, in June, 15 people, including four foreigners, were killed in an assault on a heavily guarded UN office in Mogadishu.

The MSF pull-out will affect all of Somalia, including the semi-autonomous region of Puntland and the breakaway republic of Somaliland.

The group said that Somalia was the only country in which it has operated where it has had to "take the exceptional measure of utilising armed guards".

MSF workers can intervene only if their presence is accepted by all warring parties and communities and only if those groups agree to respect the safety of patients and humanitarian staff.

"This acceptance, always fragile in conflict zones, no longer exists in Somalia today," the MSF statement said.

Cote d'Ivoire: Pro-Opposition Newspaper Suspended for 26 Publications

The National Press Council (CNP), the statutory press regulatory body, has suspended the privately-owned pro-opposition newspaper, Le Quotidien d'Abidjan, for repeatedly breaching the laws and ethics governing the press.

According to its August 9, 2013 communiqué, the CNP has suspended the newspaper for 26 publications as punishment for consistently violating the law of December 2004 on the legal regime of the press.

"These breaches are unacceptable and in spite of series of summons and warnings, Le Qoutidien d'Abidjan, continued to publish articles which clearly violates the basic tenets of the profession," the communiqué read.

The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)'s monitor in the country reported that the suspension came after the newspaper admitted it was guilty of "repeated offences that violates the press laws."

According to the monitor, the newspaper had been cautioned a number of times about its unprofessional reportage. "In fact, the paper was recently banned from appearing for two-months and its managing editor, Allian Alliali, had his professional identity card withdrawn for unprofessional publication."

The MFWA urges the CNP to come up with training and sensitization activities to re-orient and enhance professionalism and knowledge within the Ivorian media. We make this call based on increasing trends of suspension-sanctions for media unprofessionalism by the CNP.

Considering the numerous media development issues and gaps in the country, we fear that these suspensions will eventually lead to self-censorship and gagging of the Ivorian media rather than mitigating unprofessionalism and related-practices.

Africa: 'Time for African Seats On UN Council'

South African International Relations Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane has called on the United Nations to give Africa a minimum of two permanent seats on the body's Security Council.

Briefing journalists after hosting Vuk Jeremic, the president of the 67th session of the UN General Assembly, in Pretoria on Monday, Nkoana-Mashabane also called on developed countries to honour the promises of economic support for environmental sustainability that they had made to developing countries.

She said the world body could not continue "to ignore and exclude the 54 member states that form a very critical region, the African Union," noting that "seventy percent of the issues taken to the UN Security Council and are tabled for discussion are about us."

Jeremic, whose one-year presidential term of the 67th session ends in September, agreed that there was need for change, as well as fair representation of African states on the council.

"If the institution does not keep up with the times and the environment, then the Security Council will become slowly but surely irrelevant," he said.

"In the future, if we are going to have a Security Council, and if we are going to have a United Nations ... we will have to encompass African interests through a permanent seat at the Security Council."

In 2000, the United Nations member states met at a Millennium Summit to discuss and adopt development goals around eradicating poverty and hunger, eradicating HIV/Aids, malaria and other diseases, and achieving environmental sustainability and development through global partnerships.

Member states agreed at the time that they would work towards achieving these goals in 15 years.

With the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals looming, Nkoana-Mashabane called on developed countries to remember the commitments they had made.

"The one commitment that the developed states [made was to] contribute 0.7% of their national budgets to developmental goals of the developing world. The last time we checked, we don't know how many countries have [lived up to their promises]," she said.

"Secondly, it was that they would continue on that principle of equal but differentiated responsibility [on] issues that come with greenhouse gas emissions, because they have had 100 years of uninterrupted pollution ... and we woke up one morning and we were all affected."

Ugandan App for Pain-Free Malaria Test

Kampala — In his 21 years Brian Gitta has had malaria too many times to count. And over the years, because of the numerous times he has had to have his blood drawn to test for the disease, he has developed a fear of needles. It is little wonder then that he and three of his fellow computer science students worked hard to develop a mobile phone app that detects malaria - without the use of needles.

"I was two or three years old when I first contracted it," says Gitta, who is studying computer science at Makerere University in Kampala.

"It's very unusual to meet people in Uganda who haven't had malaria. If you go to a clinic, you might find that 90 percent of patients have it."

Annually an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 Ugandans die from the tropical disease, which is transmitted to humans by mosquitos carrying the malaria parasite. That makes it the country's biggest killer, according to the NGO Malaria Consortium Uganda. Experts say nearly half (about 42 percent) of Uganda's 34.5 million people are host to the malaria parasite, although they do not display any signs of being ill.

Gitta's most recent bout of malaria, just before Christmas in 2012, was severe. He contracted brucellosis, an infectious disease contracted by the consumption of unsterilised milk or meat, and typhoid at the same time and had to be hospitalised for a month.

"I had to undergo lots of blood tests. I was in lots of pain and the doctor's queue was long," he says.

Gitta was bedridden during his convalescence, and during that time he had a light bulb moment. He imagined a "mobile medical centre" that offered a quicker and pain-free diagnosis without needles and pricks. Gitta envisaged using a small device for this - but it was a big vision.

But as soon as he recovered he set to work on realising it.

And this July in St Petersburg, Russia, Gitta, Joshua Businge, Simon Lubambo and Josiah Kavuma, known as team Code 8, were announced the winners of the inaugural Women's Empowerment Award at Microsoft's global student software competition, Imagine Cup. The all-male group was recognised for their development of an application that they call Matibabu, Swahili for medical centre.

In Uganda, malaria is diagnosed via either the microscopic examination of blood films or a rapid diagnostic test.

The microscopic diagnosis usually takes about 30 minutes or longer and requires a lab technologist. It is considered the "gold standard" of testing, as it is the most reliable method. It reveals the presence or absence of the parasite in the blood, the parasite species and the extent to which they have multiplied in the body.

However, a rapid diagnostic test can be done anywhere and without a qualified microscopist. It usually takes about 15 minutes to get the results, though it cannot show the number of parasites as a microscopic diagnosis does.

Matibabu uses a custom-made portable device called a matiscope, which is connected to a smartphone, to do a rapid diagnostic test. The user's finger is inserted into the matiscope, and the application uses a red light to penetrate the skin and detect the red blood cells.

"It's been shown that infected red blood cells have a different physical, chemical and biomedical structure from a normal red blood cell, hence [we] used light-scattering technology to determine the scatter patterns of both normal and infected cells," Kavuma tells IPS.

"Through the difference in the patterns, the app is able to diagnose for malaria without a blood sample."

The hardware has a light-emitting diode and a light sensor, and it transmits the test results to the user's phone for processing.

Matibabu then sends the results to the Microsoft file hosting service, Skydrive, and these can be shared with the patient's doctor almost immediately, preventing the long delay in getting results.

Code 8 says that Matibabu, which can currently only be used with the Windows phone operating system, will help pregnant women in particular. According to the World Health Organisation, half the world's population is susceptible to malaria. Pregnant women, young children and people living with HIV/AIDS are especially vulnerable.

"When a pregnant woman gets malaria it affects the baby," Lubambo tells IPS. "But if it's able to be detected very early it could reduce miscarriages."

However, the team hopes to have Android and other OS versions by mid-2014. They say when they begin introducing other versions for different platforms, they may start using file hosting services, like Dropbox, to store the results.

The students hope their device will be on the market within two years and say the application will be free to download. The hardware may cost between 20 and 35 dollars. The young developers concede that this is a lot of money for many Ugandans.

Currently, in Uganda's private health sector both the microscopic diagnosis and the rapid diagnostic test cost under five dollars, Dr Jane Achan, professor at the department of paediatrics and child health at the Makerere University College of Health Sciences tells IPS.

Malaria affects mostly rural dwellers, she says, adding that in Apach district, northern Uganda, a patient receives over 1,500 infected mosquito bites a year. These people may not have access to smartphones.

"The urban settings are already a little more advantaged in that their health facilities are more accessible, they have more doctors and they have more accessible diagnostic facilities," Achan explains. "At the end of the day this app has to be compared with what is existing and available."

Moses Kizito is the director of private SAS Clinic in Kampala, where they test no less than 50 patients a day for malaria and receive eight to 10 positive results.

He says at the moment Matibabu seemed "quite expensive" but in the long run it may prove economical.

"Once people are forced to go to the clinic [with malaria] it's expensive to manage the disease," Kizito tells IPS.

"With this test people may be able to avoid a doctor's consultation and treat malaria in its early stages before it causes anaemia and brain damage. Once this app comes out, the impact's going to be great."

Kavuma says that Microsoft has offered the group mentoring and business training, but they are considering other options to market and manufacture the product.

"We are planning on contacting Chinese companies for this," he says.

Gitta hopes other diseases can be diagnosed in a similar way. "The future is bright and anything can happen... ," he says. "Let's watch out for the next great thing."