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• By Mkhululi Chimoio

JOHANNESBURG- The family of the dead 36 year-old Zimbabwean man Themba Sibanda are still waiting for answers on the cause of death of their beloved brother three weeks after he was found hanging from the roof
scarf.

According to family members who are crying foul over allegations that the police officer believed to be a secret lover of the deceased man’s girl friend took away both the girlfriend and the suicide note which was left by Sibanda prior to his death. They further allege that police officers told them they have no right to ask questions because they are foreigners.

“Why did the police vanish with the girlfriend? We have failed to locate her since the death our brother. We want to know what happened to the girl and the money,” said Danny Sibanda a brother to the deceased man.
Booysens Police spokesperson Warrant Officer Lorraine van Emmerik said, “A note was found after the man was found hanged. We can’t disclose the contents because it is part of our investigations.”  She added that cops were waiting for the post-mortem report to find out if there was any foul play. Sibanda and his girlfriend lived in Booysens and it is allegedly that prior to his death the deceased man had an argument over accusations of infidelity and that was the last time Sibanda was seen alive. Sibanda was buried last week at Johannesburg cemetery.

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Photo: Chris Simpson/IRIN

Chronic drought means some families in Kayes have nothing left to share

KAYES,  – “It was the drought that made people move away from here,” Ousmane Touré said in Kayes, 450km northwest of Bamako, the capital of Mali, and a 10-hour bus ride across the scorched scrubland of the western Sahel. “There had been a tradition of emigration, but it was when the harvests failed in the 1970s that we saw a real surge in emigration. There was simply not enough to eat, so people took off for France, Germany and the United States. They knew it was only the way of feeding their families back home in Kayes. The same thing is happening this year.”

Touré heads the Association of Returning Migrants of Kayes (AMRK), a welfare organization that tries to provide short-term shelter and counselling to people coming back to this part of the country. The returnees, particularly those from the ethnic Soninké community, which spreads across Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, have played a major role in developing western Mali through their remittances and other cash transfers, giving it a stronger identity and economic base. Many of them are now deportees who have fallen foul of immigration restrictions in France and other countries.

“The emigrants have been well-organized and have always ensured money gets channelled back, building health centres, schools, even roads,” said Touré, but the economic crisis in Europe and tighter immigration controls are having a serious knock-on effect, and impoverished villages can no longer count on the same level of support.

In Mali the three-month rainy season starts in June, with the heaviest falls in July and August. This is the time when everyone participates in the intense agricultural activity of the main cropping season, which provides most of the food for the rest of the year. The lean period occurs in the driest months, just before the next rains come.

For Kayes, the capital of Mali’s First Region, which borders Mauritania, Senegal and Guinea, 2012 is a particularly tough year. Besides the effects of political turbulence elsewhere in the country and a rebellion in the north, serious food security problems appeared months ago, after sparse rains. Surveys by the government and international agencies identified Kayes and the surrounding areas as particularly vulnerable, and likely to be exposed to severe food shortages as an already impoverished population experienced the impact of failed harvests.

Photo: Chris Simpson/IRIN

Mariam Cissoko, President of a Farmers Association in Kayes

By February, market prices for sorghum, millet, groundnuts and other basic foodstuffs were grossly inflated; food reserves were depleted well ahead of the usual lean season, with alarming shortages of seeds. There were complaints that the government’s emergency food rations had given temporary respite to some villages but had ignored dozens more, as well as serious nutritional concerns, particularly for children. The UN estimated that 1.6 million Malians would be food insecure in 2012.

The events in the capital and the north have overshadowed the food crisis in the west. “A lot of things have been put on standby,” said Abdoulaye Samoura, advocacy officer for NGO Oxfam. “There have been serious delays in getting food distributed.” The dramatic price hikes at local markets in January and February have eased off, but there is no reason for complacency.

“What do you do when there is no food and you have to take care of five, 10, 20 people?” Touré asked. The answer is an exodus of men to Bamako, or across the border into Senegal, or to the gold-mining areas 75km to the south.

Mariam Cissoko, who heads the women’s section of the Association des Organisations Professionnelles Paysannes - Association of Professional Peasant Farmers (AOPP) – in Kayes, confirms that 2012 has been markedly worse. “It rained for only month of the usual three (in 2011) and that has meant drought and everything that comes with it,” she said.

“For us, the Bambara people, we don’t have the same tradition of emigration as the Soninké. We are agro-pastoralists. If you work the land, you will also have some livestock. But there is a strong spirit of solidarity here. In normal times, if you have something in reserve, you will give to those who don’t. But times like these, people just don’t have anything to spare.”

The priorities are stark. “Feed us and feed our animals,” stressed Cissoko. “If NGOs come and talk to us about education, that is all well and good, but we need food first. Without that, everything falls to pieces. People will get sick. Children won’t go to school. Men may be able to take off and look for opportunities elsewhere, but women and children are stuck where they are.”

Photo: Chris Simpson/IRIN

Market gardening is increasingly important to boost food security

Kayes has been described as the second hottest place in Africa after Djibouti. “I grew up here and I remember an abundance of corn. We didn’t have droughts like we get now,” Cissoko told IRIN. “In the hottest months, the temperature normally goes to 42 or 43 degrees Celsius, but last year it was 47 or 48 at times, in the shade. The desert is advancing and the climatic changes are here for everyone to see. It has all come progressively.”

Food aid from the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and others may ease the problem, but Cissoko says rural communities in the Kayes region are exhausted by the cycle of drought and dependency. They need long-term practical help as they confront shrinking pasture and ongoing food deficits.

“We need proper cereal banks in villages; we need irrigation systems that protect agriculture; we need a credit system that can work, where people can afford the interest rates,” she told IRIN.

Kayes town lies on the banks of the Senegal River. In stark contrast to the dominating barrenness of the western Sahel, the riverbanks are studded with neatly tended plots yielding tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and other crops. This is all part of the maraîchage, or market gardening, that provides women in particular with a livelihood. “When I was a child, people said: ‘You will never get to plant fruit and vegetables here,’” but they were wrong. That was forty years ago. It began timidly, but the gardening has really picked up.”

But Cissoko acknowledges that cereal production is critical, and Ousmane Touré is equally blunt in demanding that the state and its international partners step up their efforts to help Kayes cope with the food deficits and the devastating drought. “What do you do when there is no food?” he asked. “People will not stay here. Families will disappear.”

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source www.irinnews.org

TALATA,  – When officials asked everybody in the commune (sub-district) of Talata in Madagascar’s central Amoron’i Mania region to register their land in 2007, it was to be the beginning of a national programme of far-reaching and much needed land reforms aimed at recognizing local land rights and decentralizing land management. But local authorities had made little progress before the 2009 political crisis, branded a coup by the international community, stalled the process.

“There are still many fights over land in this area,” said schoolteacher Jean Philibert Rakotoarison, who last year bought a plot of land to build a new house. “I paid one million ariary [US$500] for the land, and it cost 1.5 million ariary to have it registered with all the authorities. I spent a year doing this.”

Madagascar was the first country to receive a US$110 million “compact” (aid grant) from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the bilateral foreign aid agency established by US President George W Bush in 2005.

Key to the grant’s aim of helping rural Malagasy move from subsistence agriculture to a market economy was the Land Tenure Project, but the government’s commitment to this project, which complemented its own National Land Reform Programme, did not prevent it from allocating 1.3 million hectares of land to South Korean company Daewoo Logistics to produce palm oil and corn for export to Korea.

When the deal came to light in 2008, it was used to stir up public anger and contributed to the downfall of then president Marc Ravalomanana, and the coup d’état by Andry Rajoelina.

After Rajoelina’s military takeover, MCC terminated its compact with Madagascar with its land tenure project far from complete. “We set up 235 local land offices in six regions, handed out 60,000 certificates, and trained the staff there. For the second phase of the programme, we were planning to cover half of Madagascar, but because of the crisis, it never got that far,” the MCC’s former land director, Yolande Razafindrakoto, told IRIN.

To salvage some of the work already done, Razafindrakoto set up the NGO EFA (Ezaka ho Fampandrosoana any Ambanivohitra, meaning Together for Rural Development). “I knew these farmers needed me,” she said. “Land rights are really the basis of development. You can teach a farmer to grow crops, but it is no use. A farmer won’t invest in land if it can be taken away from him.”

EFA is now one of three NGOs working on land reform in the country. With funding from the National Land Programme, which continues to function at a slow pace and with minimal resources, and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), it gives technical assistance to 39 local land offices in the Northern Atsinanana region.

Red tape

Before the political crisis, government changed legislation which made all land not titled automatically the property of the state, and made it easier for citizens to claim unoccupied land for agriculture or development, a reform that Rakotoarison described as “a revolution”. However, the procedure for claiming land still involves a nightmare of red tape and the decentralization of decisions about land ownership to the communes is incomplete.

You can teach a farmer to grow crops, but it is no use. A farmer won’t invest in land if it can be taken away from him

In areas like Talata, which is still waiting for a local land office to be established, all decisions are still taken in the capital, Antananarivo. “This means many trips into the city to different offices,” Rakotoarison told IRIN. “Sometimes, these bureaucrats only work from 8-9am. You are at the mercy of these people, you never know what their decisions are based on. If you’re lucky, you can get the procedures done in a year.”

Ernest Rakotoarivony, a 45-year-old farmer, managed to claim 40 hectares (ha) of land to grow rice, but it took him 20 years to go through the registration process. “It was worth it, though,” he said. “If it’s not your land, you won’t work hard on it, thinking that one day it might be gone. Now, no one can take it away from me. “

Even land sales involving two parties are not straight forward. “When you go to Antananarivo to register your contract, the court will still ask you for all kinds of documents. This is tricky, because if it takes a long time for the land to be transferred to your name, the other party can collect your money and then ask for the land back,” said Rakotoarison.

In those places that do have a land office, cadastral operations (decisions about land ownership made by the government many years ago) are often out-dated and unfinished. Sometimes the procedures go as far back as the 1930s with land titles remaining in the name of great-grandfathers. In other cases, several owners may be listed for the same plot of land.

Land that used to belong to former French colonizers is another point of dispute. “These French people don’t live there any more. Their families might be somewhere in France, and in the meantime farmers have worked on this land for generations,” explained Razafindrakoto. “According to Malagasy law, this gives them the right to ownership after 20 years. The courts decide on this after the request of the farmers, but the procedures are so complicated, that even literate people have trouble with them, so illiterate farmers have no chance.”

Foreign agribusiness projects

Although the downfall of President Ravalomanana brought the Daewoo project to a halt, it did not end foreign investors’ attempts to acquire land in Madagascar.

According to a paper presented at the 2011 International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, about 50 agribusiness projects were announced between 2005 and 2010, about 30 of which are still active, covering a total land area of about 150,000 ha. Projects include plantations to produce sugar cane, cassava and jatropha-based biofuel.

With foreign investors still looking for land, the importance of certificates and titles to prove land ownership is paramount. “If someone wants to take these farmers’ land, they at least will have something. This paper will give them the right to be compensated… but if they don’t have a land title or certificate, they lose everything,” EFA’s Razafindrakoto told IRIN.

To prevent the negative impacts of land grabbing, EFA has set up social models for investors, with funding from the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The goal is to help investors negotiate with the people in the area where they want to implement projects, as a way to prevent future problems. “We try to prevent investors taking over land and coming with big machines, without employing the people who surround the project,” Razafindrakoto said.

One such project is already under way around Fort Dauphin in the southern Tsihombe, Ambovombe and Beloha districts, where the French company Phileol has built a factory to produce oil from the castor oil plant, ricinus communis. EFA negotiated with Phileol to ensure the factory buys castor oil plants from local farmers. It soon discovered, however, that the farmers were not able to produce enough to meet demand, as they lacked good seeds, and were not well organized. The NGO is now working with the farmers to build their capacity and organize them into groups that can negotiate for themselves.

“We make sure that the farmers supplying the factory receive training and seeds, and that they will be able to sell their goods at a good price,” Razafindrakoto told IRIN. “We put everybody together in a village committee, so that they can manage themselves after we leave.”

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source www.irinnews-org

Photo: UNEP

Heart of the matter? Almost half of Sudan’s oil is pumped out of Heglig

NAIROBI,  – Once again the disputed and oil-rich borderland area of Heglig is at the centre of a confrontation between Sudan and the newly-independent South Sudan, giving rise to renewed fears of a resumption of all-out war.

The African Union’s (AU) Peace and Security Council has described South Sudan’s occupation of Heglig as illegal, saying it lies north of the 1956 border which Juba and Khartoum agreed – in a 2005 accord that ended decades of civil war – would be their common frontier should the south eventually secede, which indeed it did in July 2011.

Sudan has warned its neighbour of strikes deep inside its territory if it fails to withdraw from Heglig, which South Sudan also claims.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has spoken directly to South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, also to urge a withdrawal.

For its part, South Sudan has accused Sudan of repeatedly bombing its territory since November and of dropping five bombs on Bentiu, the capital of Unity State, on 12 April. That day, South Sudan President Salva Kiir addressed parliament in his capital, Juba.

“I always say we will not take the people of South Sudan back to war, but if we are being aggressed like this we will have to defend ourselves,” he said.

“I am appealing to the citizens of the Republic of Sudan, especially the mothers, not to allow their children to be dragged into a meaningless war,”

Where is Heglig?

More pertinently, does it lie in Sudan, or South Sudan? Despite the AU’s indignation, the answer to this question is far from clear-cut.

Heglig sits close to the middle of the 1,800km border between the two countries, but key parts of the border have not yet been demarcated and there are insufficient historical records (because of widespread population displacement during the development of oil installations) or living memories to easily identify the path of the 1956 line.

Heglig lies between Abyei, another disputed area, and the Nuba Mountains of Sudan’s South Kordofan State, where, since June 2011, government forces have been battling insurgents (SPLA-N) with links to the former rebels now in power in Juba.

Heglig is also close to the border town of Jau, which was captured in late February by the SPLA-N.

During the negotiations that led to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) it was agreed that Heglig (known as Panthou by southerners, who claim it had always been in Unity State) would be included in Abyei, one of the “Three Areas” (along with South Kordofan and Blue Nile) whose north-or-south status was not fully resolved by the accord. Despite this lack of resolution, Abyei has been occupied by Sudanese troops since May 2011.

Photo: Peter Moszynski/IRIN

Nuba soldiers from the SPLA-N 9th division at a checkpoint in Jau, on the disputed border between Sudan and South Sudan (file photo)

After Khartoum rejected the initial boundaries of Abyei defined up by an international commission, these were redrawn in 2009 by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in a ruling hat considerably shrank the area and excluded Heglig.

Although this court made no determination on the path of the north-south border, Khartoum insisted the ruling left Heglig in its South Kordofan State, an interpretation the AU now seems to share.

South Sudan, which says it is open to negotiations on the issue, insists Heglig lies south of the border, in its Unity State.

Why is Heglig so significant?

Links can be drawn between the latest escalation and key issues that remain unresolved since the CPA was signed: border demarcation, oil-revenue sharing and the Three Areas. (Abyei residents, for example, were supposed to decide in a referendum in 2011 whether to join the south but this has yet to take place).

The latest clashes also threaten an important agreement Juba and Khartoum signed in March 2012 that would have made it easier for hundreds of thousands of southerners to remain in Sudan. Without that deal, they were supposed to regularize their status – logistically almost impossible – or leave by 8 April. South Sudan is ill-equipped to accommodate such a sudden and large influx, especially because the imminent rainy season will render most roads impassable.

Veteran Sudan analyst John Ashworth told IRIN: “I don’t want to say that the CPA was flawed, because it was the best that could be hoped for at the time, but we are certainly now reaping the fruits of areas not fully addressed by the CPA.”

According to historian and Abyei expert Douglas Johnson, none of the international players involved in the CPA gave much thought to what would happen to the Three Areas in the event of secession because “they were initially entirely focused on trying to make unity appear attractive.” Once the independence writing was on the wall, “they were only concerned with ensuring that independence was peaceful.”

Mukesh Kapila, who served as UN humanitarian coordinator in Sudan in 2003 and 2004 and now works for the Aegis Trust, an advocacy NGO, told IRIN: “The CPA fudged-over the legitimate complaints of the long-suffering marginalized people of Nuba, Abyei, Blue Nile, and Darfur. Unless a sincere attempt is made to solve this in a fair and just manner, violent conflict will continue to erupt here and there. Citizenship, oil, and border demarcation may complicate the picture but they are, in significant part, proxies for the grievances of the much abused people of Sudan’s borderlands which have to be tackled first if there is to be any peace and stability for the two countries.”

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source www.irinnews.org