SOUTHERN AFRICA: IRIN-SA Weekly Round-up 24 covering the period 12 – 18 June 1999

ZIMBABWE: Civil service strike A civil servants strike on Wednesday coincided with a 20 percent maize price increase. According to government officials, trade unions and other experts, the situation which some feared could lead to public unrest, was directly linked to a shortage of funds in government coffers. Analysts said the country was pinning its hopes on how soon the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would start releasing a suspended tranche of a US $200 million arrangement facility. An IMF spokesman in Washington said its talks with the Zimbabwe government on the issue were now completed and that a decision by the IMF board could be expected in coming days once the agreement had been reviewed. A representative of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) told IRIN that they had decided on the strike action after the government of President Robert Mugabe agreed on Tuesday to grant them only a 5 percent increase, instead of the 25 percent increase demanded. Givemore Masongorere, president of the Public Services Association, told a news conference in the capital Harare that some 140,000 workers, including school teachers and state nurses, had gone on strike. Citing the growing cost of living in Zimbabwe, he said that civil servants had been negotiating an increase with the government since February last year. An economist with the Confederation of Zimbabwean industries said: “The government is quite constrained as far as funds are concerned, so they probably had to settle for a lower percentage. It is a difficult situation all round.” Maize shortages Meanwhile, The Commercial Farmers Union in Zimbabwe said it was concerned that the country would have to import close to 400,000 mt of maize to meet domestic consumption needs. A spokeswoman told IRIN this week that in spite of the deficit, farmers would still be likely to export some of their crop. Although there was a similar grain deficit situation last year, she said farmers had nevertheless exported an estimated 220,000 mt mainly to neighbouring Zambia, and to Malawi. Citing figures largely in agreement with those published in the June report of USAID’s Food Early Warning System (FEWS), she said the union expected a crop size of about 1.5 million mt by April next year, while the country would require for its consumption 1.89 million mt. ANGOLA: FAO, WFP alarmed at food situation Two UN agencies this week published a joint warning that over 1.7 million Angolans faced malnutrition through a combination of war and an insufficient donor response to the crisis. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) said fighting between government forces and UNITA rebels had seriously curtailed farming in Angola’s key maize-growing regions. “The number of people of people in Angola now internally displaced has reached 1.7 million and it is growing,” WFP spokesman, Francis Mwanza, told IRIN this week. “The situation is now getting dramatic and we need a better response from donors.” The report said Angola required an estimated 180,000 mt of maize for the 1999/2000 marketing year. Of this 56,000 mt had been pledged by donors leaving a shortfall of 124,000 mt. It said cereal output in Angola was down by 11 percent in 1998/1999 compared to the year before, and said this was despite favourable weather conditions. “This is a direct reflection of the increased insecurity in the country since the resumption of the civil war last December and population displacement,” Mwanza said. The report said the cereal import requirement for Angola, because of the crisis was estimated at 505,000 mt, compared to 420,000 mt imported the previous year. Child malnutrition a major concern Child malnutrition in Angola is believed to have reached levels worse than at any previous time in over 20 years of civil war, according to a new report published this week. The report, based on the results of a survey in the besieged government-held central highlands city of Huambo by Save the Children Fund (UK), Concern and the Angolan health ministry, “provides startling evidence” of the plight of Angola’s population, an SCF spokesman told IRIN. The survey showed that 16.7 percent of children under five in Humabo were suffering from malnutrition, of whom 3.5 percent were severely malnourished. “A conservative estimate of the population of Huambo is around 350,000 of whom about 70,000 are under five,” the report said. “Save the Children fears that this level of malnutrition is likely to be mirrored across the population. If this state of affairs continues, then immunity to disease will decrease and mortality could rise in Huambo.” It said that 12,000 children in Huambo currently required target feeding, but because of a lack of resources, there was sufficient food to provide for only 2,850 children daily. It was also “abundantly clear” that malnutrition among the Huambo’s own residents was “on par” with that suffered by tens of thousands of internally displaced people sheltering in the city. Nutritional surveys in Huambo, the report said, showed that in January 1994, 8.5 percent of children were suffering from malnutrition. The levels dropped to 7.9 percent in September that year, and to 3.7 percent by April 1995, until the resumption of the war pushed the current figure to 16.7 percent. Humanitarian workers killed UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, this week urged the Angolan government and the UNITA rebel movement to improve security and protection for humanitarian workers in Angola. His plea was made in a statement expressing his “profound sorrow and concern” at the weekend ambush of four humanitarian workers from the NGO Instituto Portugues de Medicina Preventiva. In the incident on 12 June, IRIN was told that men in UNITA uniforms had ambushed their clearly marked vehicle just 80km east of the capital Luanda. Vieira de Mello said: “This barbaric act comes at a time when the humanitarian community is seeking unhindered access to assist populations in need throughout the Angolan territory and only two months after six relief workers were brutally killed in similar circumstances.” De Beers says complying with diamond embargo Meanwhile, the rights group Global Witness has challenged the diamond transnational De Beers and its London-based Central Selling Organisation to publicly clarify how they have changed their purchasing operations to ensure they no longer buy UN embargoed Angolan diamonds. “Up until the embargo it was no secret that they were buying up Angolan diamonds,” Charmian Gooch of Global Witness told IRIN. “What they are not telling anybody now is how they are altering their buying structures. If they are serious about this, in part they must recognise they have to become more transparent.” An estimated 70 percent of all rough diamonds are sold through the Central Selling Organisation. Angolan diamonds are of a particularly high quality and easily distinguishable.In an attempt to end UNITA’s main source of revenue, a UN Security Council resolution in July last year embargoed unofficial Angolan diamond sales. De Beers insist they have complied “with both the spirit and the letter” of the resolution. Senior De Beers officials met the chairman of the UN Angola Sanctions Committee, Robert Fowler, during a fact-finding tour in May to examine the loopholes to the sanctions policy and offered reassurance of their collaboration. NAMIBIA/ANGOLA: UNITA training Caprivi rebels Four Caprivi secessionist leaders in political asylum in Botswana are believed to have left the country to join Caprivi dissidents being trained by the UNITA rebel movement in Angola, diplomatic sources told IRIN this week.The four men failed to report to the police last Friday under the terms of the agreement for their stay in Botswana, and have been declared wanted by the Gaborone authorities and their refugee status had been withdrawn. The concern was that they have joined UNITA who, according to regional security analysts, are training an estimated 500-600 Caprivian rebels in southeast Angola. “We fear that members of the leadership and people from Namibia have been crossing into Angola,” the sources told IRIN. “UNITA would be training them as a second option should Namibia get sucked into the Angolan conflict.” MALAWI: Population growth poses poverty challenge As Malawians voted in the country’s second democratic presidential and parliamentary elections this week, analysts pondered whether the winning party would be able to implement effective strategies to reduce the grinding poverty under which an overwhelming majority of the population lives. Malawi’s poor are not a homogenous group, but consist of a cross-section of the population, a UNICEF official told IRIN. The most vulnerable include smallholders with less than one hectare of land; estate workers; estate tenants; the urban poor; female-headed households and children.”The condition of poverty is characterised by the lack of productive means to fulfill basic needs such as food, water, shelter, education and health,” the official said, adding that the poor tend to have limited access to productive resources and basic services. Women Women’s rights activists in Malawi were concerned that investment in their development gets too small a share of the nation’s resources in a country where women perform 70 percent of all farm work in the major smallholder agriculture sector. A spokeswoman at the National Commission for Women in Development said the lack of resources for women was “reflected in the lack of adequate access for women to maternal and child health care, family planning information and services, education, training and skill development for employment.” Children Malawi has one of the highest child mortality rates in Africa because of deteriorating nutrition levels and falling immunisation coverage, according to children’s rights activists. “In 1992 nearly seven out of 10 one-year-olds in Malawi had been vaccinated by their first birthdays, but this has now dropped to only six out of 10 while six percent of children have no vaccination at all by age one,” a child health specialist told IRIN this week. “This drop in immunisation partly contributes to an infant mortality rate of 133 per 1,000 live births, while the under-five mortality rate stands at 234 per 1,000 live births,” among the highest in the sub-Saharan Africa. SOUTH AFRICA: Parliament elects Mbeki president The South Africa parliament this week elected Thabo Mbeki to succeed President Nelson Mandela following the resounding victory of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in the country’s second democratic election on 2 June. Mbeki was formally sworn into office for a five-year term on Wednesday at a ceremony in the capital, Pretoria, to which leaders from Africa and around the world were invited. DRC talks Meanwhile, behind the pomp and ceremony of the inauguration it was expected that there would be hard bargaining among assembled regional heads of state on a workable settlement to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) conflict, government officials told IRIN. “All the regional presidents will be in town for the inauguration and the DRC will be discussed,” foreign affairs spokesman Marco Boni said this week. He told IRIN that he did not have any information on an alleged framework peace initiative that the US magazine ‘Newsweek’ reported Mbeki plans to unveil at the inauguration which would involve South African troops in a peacekeeping role in the DRC. New allies in Africa And a new understanding was being forged between sub-Saharan Africa’s regional superpowers South African and Nigeria on a joint approach to solving conflict on the continent. Speaking at a news conference in Johannesburg this week, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said the relationship between the two countries had to be one of collaboration and not competition. “With the on-going conflicts in Africa today, unless we really cooperate there is no way that we can see an end to many of them.” Policy analysts told IRIN that with the end of military rule in Nigeria, and the close personal ties between Obasanjo and former president Nelson Mandela, a new strategic relationship based on a commitment to peace and economic development in Africa could emerge between the two regional hegemons. “South Africa and Nigeria want the relationship to work. This was emphasised by Mandela cutting short his election campaigning to attend Obasanjo’s inauguration. And Obasanjo will be attending (Thabo) Mbeki’s inauguration,” John Strimler at the South African Institute of International Relations said. “One of the most obvious and natural relationships would be for the two to work together in peacekeeping.” Obasanjo agrees on Nigeria peacekeepers for DRC Obasanjo said that he could forsee a role for Nigerian peacekeeping troops in the as part of a collaborative peace initiative with South Africa. Obasanjo, said that “under the right auspices and the right conditions,” a Nigerian peacekeeping force could be dispatched to DRC. “We would like to see a situation where we can help a country like the Congo to help itself and where troops from other countries can be withdrawn. We can help to achieve this,” he said. MOZAMBIQUE: No decision on election date A decision is yet to be made by the national electoral body on the date of Mozambique’s next general elections, state administration minister Alfredo Gamito told IRIN this week. “The president of the electoral commission must propose a date to the head of state,” Gamito said. The elections were planned to take place in October. But parliamentary delays forced a slippage in the timetable. Under the constitution the deadline for the polls is December, in the middle of the raining season, which would cause havoc with the logistics of the electoral process if the polls were held then. ZAMBIA: Diesel fuel shortage Zambia is experiencing one of the most serious diesel fuel shortages since the 1960s, the BBC reported this week. It said that many passengers had been left stranded and that long distance bus services from the capital to other towns had been disrupted. It said some haulage firms had been forced to take their trucks off the road. The shortage comes one month after a devastating fire destroyed Zambia’s only oil refinery at Ndola, on the Copperbelt. AFRICA: Aiming for a telecommunications revolution South Africa is leading the way in formulating a strategy for a telecommunications revolution in Africa aimed at providing the political infrastructure to attract investment and boost development across the continent, government officials told IRIN. The ‘Africa Connection’ strategy emphasises the link between communications and economic growth. The approach is based on the realisation that, with only 12 telephone lines per 1,000 people on the continent compared with 414 per 1,000 people in the industrialised world, “if we don’t connect up Africa we will really get left behind,” Mandy Woods, personal assistant to former communications minister Jay Naidoo told IRIN.