Tag: GreatLakesNews

{Tanzania Ports Authority Acting Director General Aloyce Matei told reporters in the city that the World Bank has provided a loan of 600 million US dollars while 30 million US dollars have been issued by Trade Mark East Africa and the Department for International Development (DFID).}

TPA will contribute the remaining 60 million US dollars, he said. The improvement will be carried out in five years and is primarily meant to make the country’s sea gateway enlarge its cargo handling capacity.

“In order to enable large ships to enter the port and also being able to afford serving the huge increase of cargo that is expected in the coming years, so improvement to the infrastructure and performance system is very necessary,” Matei said.

He said that shipment of cargo at the port for the past five years has been increasing at an average of nine per cent annually, with a noticeable increase of shipments in oil and containers.

“The growth indicates that until 2030 the amount of cargo will increase to 38 million tons from 16 million tons in 2014/15,” he said. According to Matei, the improvement will go together with the rehabilitation of a number of berths in order to enable large ships to land at the port.

The transfer of Kurasini Oil Jet (KOJ) pier and oil pipelines at the area of construction and improvement of the rail network and construction of the uploading and downloading luggage on wagons are some of the activities which will take place.

He added that research has been done on environmental impact assessment before the start of the project and TPA has a permit certificate from the National Environment Management Council.

He however, said that there is no shortage of incoming cargo and this is for all ports worldwide due to the global economic crisis — especially in China and other countries using Dar es Salaam port.

Meanwhile, Eng Mary Mhayaya of the TPA said the project of flow metre at the Kigamboni area which spent 6.5 million US dollars was completed last month and awaits a permit from the Weight and Measures Agency (WMA) to start working officially.

She said already the metres’ operators have already trained on how to operate. “Stakeholders have shown their satisfaction with the system of using flow metre and they will get more information about the system online,” she said.

{Sources told the Nation that there are only eight pilots actively engaged in the business.}

Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) is facing an acute shortage of marine pilots and engineers, leading to overwork at the country’s main sea port.

Sources told the Nation that there are only eight pilots actively engaged in the business and it remains unclear how the port will deal with the problem.

“Ports everywhere in the world require an optimal number of 17 pilots, out of which 14 deal with the active day-to-day work while three handle administrative duties,” a source said.

Contacted for comment, marine analyst Andrew Mwangura claimed that the port of Mombasa has eight marine pilots, including head of marine operations, chief pilot and hydrographic officer.

According to him, the authority lost Captain Francis Muhia, who resigned to pursue greener postures in the Persian Gulf recently.

“The port also lost another pilot, a senior marine pilot, Captain Eugene Sylvester Okoth, who passed away recently,” he said, adding that it will take time to train more pilots to fill the huge gap.

A shipping expert who spoke on condition of anonymity warned that operating the port with fewer marine pilots was catastrophic, bearing in mind the job needed round-the-clock “alertness and attention.”

“A pilot is a mariner who manoeuvres ships through dangerous or congested waters like our treacherous channel into the port.

“[The work] requires an alert and well-trained mind [so as] not to cause marine accidents,” the expert said.

KPA chairman Marsden Madoka said they had launched a training programme to increase the number of personnel to the required level.

{President John Magufuli has directed pension funds to invest in profit-driven projects, including industries, where profit and employment opportunities will be created instead of focusing on infrastructure development.}

Dr Magufuli has also agreed to reduce the number of pension funds, promising to complete the work by 2017, directing the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office (Parliamentary Affairs, Policy, Labour, Employment, Youth and the Disabled), Ms Jenista Mhagama, to start working on the matter.

President Magufuli made the remarks when he led thousands of Tanzanians in joining fellow workers all over the world to celebrate the International Workers’ Day, which was held nationally at the Jamhuri Stadium in the new capital city designate.

He said building industries and increasing employment opportunities will provide double profits, including membership from the industrial employees.

“In investing in a culvert, the benefit will be a short-term one as opposed to investing in industries, which will provide long-term benefits and contribute to the growth of the nations’ economy through increasing employment opportunities, membership and production of goods,” he noted.

Dr Magufuli agreed on the need to scale down the number of pension funds in the country, promising to complete the work within the next one year.

He, however, cautioned that looking at the history that established the pension funds, caution must be taken when scaling down the number of the pension funds, while directing Ms Mhagama, who is responsible with the portfolio, to take up the matter.

The president said that companies that do not remit contributions to pension funds have been directed to do so immediately, noting that even the Treasury had not remitted 710bn/- but have now remitted 500bn/- to the PSPF.

“I am directing the Treasury and other companies to remit the contributions every month.” Dr Magufuli stressed that every employee was entitled to join a trade union or form one in their workplaces, which is a right that should not be denied by their employers. He, however, cautioned workers to refrain from using the unions as a political mouthpiece or instrument.

The president expressed his interest to see more people joining pension funds, especially the health insurance fund, noting that the National Health Insurance Fund has established the Community Health Fund (CHF) for rural people.

Dr Magufuli also noted the importance of workers’ contracts, noting that the laws governing the work will be amended to include stern measures that should entail heavy penalties for employers who will fail to uphold any part of the requirements of the laws.

Earlier, Trade Union Congress of Tanzania (TUCTA) Secretary General Nicholas Mgaya requested the government to reduce the number of pension funds in the country to two; one serving for the private sector and the other for the public sector. Mr Mgaya said TUCTA believed in the current government in power and hoped that working conditions and remuneration for the majority of workers, who are the main drivers of government revenue, will be improved.

“In this, we recommend to the Fifth Phase government to come up with salary policy that will govern improvements of salaries and allowance for workers in the public and private sector,” he said.

Mr Mgaya noted that since the 5th Phase government came into power, hope has been restored among Tanzanian workers, as the government is implementing the rule of law in the country “contrary to what was the case before’’.

He said in the next five years of the 5th Phase government workers will enjoy better salaries due to ongoing efforts to increase revenue as opposed to previous governments.

Mr Mgaya commended the steps taken by government to rescue the PSFP by paying its debt and for retirees to start receiving their pensions, stressing that pension fund employees should stop giving themselves loans, which they cannot pay back.

{The inter Burundian dialogue that was scheduled to take place from May 2 to 6 in Arusha, Tanzania has been postponed.
}

This was announced on Friday by the office of former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa who is also the facilitator of the talks.

“Following consultations between the facilitator in the Burundi dialogue, former Tanzanian President Benjamin William Mkapa and East African Community (EAC) Secretary General Liberat Mfumukeko, the resumption of the dialogue which was due on May 2-6 has now been postponed,” indicated the statement.

The statement further added that this will provide more time to make further consultations with stake holders and all concerned parties.

The office said that the dialogue will probably take place in the third week of May.

Earlier this week, the Burundian government said that it would not participate in the talks, arguing that it had not been consulted, and went ahead to give a set of conditions to be fulfilled before hand.

Previous talks, then mediated by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, failed to make any headway.

Meanwhile, violence in the country continues to escalate as five people were killed in an armed attack in the capital Bujumbura.

The country is facing a year-long political crisis that broke out since April 2015 following the announcement by Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza that he would be seeking a third term.

{NYUNZU, Democratic Republic of Congo — Deep in the forest, miles from any major city, lies an abandoned cotton factory full of the dispossessed.}

There is no police force guarding it. No electricity or running water inside. No sense of urgency or deep concern by the national authorities to do much about it.

Instead, as the days pass, hundreds of displaced people make cooking fires or sit quietly on the concrete factory floor. Dressed in rags, they stare into space, next to huge rusted iron machinery that has not turned for decades. They are members of the Bambote, a marginalized group of forest dwellers who are victims of one of the obscure little wars that this country seems to have a talent for producing.

“It’s like we don’t exist,” said Kalunga Etienne, a Bambote elder.

This is what the Democratic Republic of Congo, the biggest country in sub-Saharan Africa and one that has stymied just about all efforts to right it, has become: a tangle of miniwars.

More than 60 armed groups are operating in North Kivu and South Kivu Provinces, including a growing Islamist insurgency, whose fighters have hacked hundreds of people to death. Beyond that, there are remnants in the Uele area of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that specializes in abducting children and turning them into killers; predatory rebels in Ituri; Bakata separatists in Katanga; armed factions in Maniema; fighters in the Nyunzu area; and youth militias in the capital, Kinshasa.

Few nations in Africa, if not the world, are home to as many armed groups. Even after billions of dollars in aid, one of the largest peacekeeping missions in United Nations history and substantial international attention over two decades, Congo’s government is incapable of providing the most elemental service: security.

Fragmentation. Factionalization. Decay. Ungoverned space. Ungovernable space. These are the terms used by aid workers and academics to describe Congo today. And it is likely to get worse.

In the coming months, Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila, is constitutionally required to step down. But he has shown no intention of doing so.

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Mr. Kabila is vastly unpopular, partly because of the miniwars, but also because of the widespread belief that he has enriched himself and his family while ignoring the millions of desperately poor Congolese. There have been deadly protests against his attempts to sidestep term limits and extend his rule. Raucous demonstrations erupted on April 20 in Lubumbashi, one of Congo’s biggest cities.

Though Mr. Kabila’s forces scored an important victory against one large rebel group, the M23, in 2013, many other armed groups have splintered into dangerous pieces. And new ones have recently sprung up, like the militias in the Nyunzu area that have killed hundreds.

There are many reasons for this, but the most widely cited are a pattern of impunity and increased local tensions over land and other resources. Other factors may be the government’s poor record of integrating former rebels into the national army and its failure to establish control in areas where larger rebel groups used to operate, which has created opportunities for new armed factions to take over.

The worry is that the growing number of local conflicts will only intensify if there is an election-related crisis, which most analysts believe could happen.

“With that electoral gamble ahead, we may see lots of things both in the Kivus and elsewhere,” said Christoph Vogel, a researcher at the University of Zurich who specializes in Congo.

Nyunzu, a territory in the southeast, a bone-crushing day’s drive from Lake Tanganyika, used to be safe. Many of the people who live here are members of the Bambote, one of several forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer groups in Congo widely known as pygmies for their short stature. The term pygmy is often used in Congo and in other parts of Africa, although the forest dwellers tend to refer to themselves by the names of their groups.

“This is our first war,” Lumbu Baruani, a Bambote elder, said with a sad shake of his head. If it were up to him, he said, he would be in the forest, hunting antelope or catching grasshoppers for a snack.

According to several analysts, it says a lot about Congo’s state of affairs when a local war draws in members of a traditional hunter-gatherer group.

“Their existence is so dependent on cooperation,” said Barry S. Hewlett, an anthropologist who has spent decades researching hunter-gatherer communities in Central Africa. “Sharing and giving is essential to their way of life. If there is a conflict even in the camp, one of the individuals just moves.”

The war started, the Bambote say, in 2014. What set it off was an extramarital affair.

The elders in Nyunzu said a man from another ethnic group, the Luba, had impregnated a Bambote woman. This caused a scandal, not least because the woman was married, and inflamed tensions between the groups.

For generations, some men from the Luba group have chosen brides from communities such as the Bambote. Many elders complained that Luba men had not shown enough respect to the women’s parents.

Scientists believe that the few remaining hunter-gatherers living in Central Africa’s vast rain forest were its original inhabitants. Their adherence to tradition has kept them far behind other groups in education and wealth. At the same time, they have maintained an unusual degree of harmony among themselves and with their environment.

When the Bambote elders confronted the Luba adulterer, he did not apologize. Instead, the elders said, he killed the woman’s husband, setting off a wave of killings between the two communities.

Deeper problems were clearly driving the feud. Analysts point to long-simmering conflicts between the Bambote and the Luba over issues like land rights and labor practices. The local authorities in Nyunzu said it had been customary for the forest dwellers to work for the Luba as field hands for as little as 50 cents a day. Sometimes, they were even paid in salt or cassava scraps.

“Historically, they have been exploited,” said Pierre Mukamba Kaseya, the head of Nyunzu’s local administration. “All of a sudden, it was as if they woke up and saw the light.”

For the first time anyone could remember, the Bambote banded together in militias and began attacking Luba villages with torches and poisoned arrows. The Luba fought back.

A wave of anger and violence rippled across the green hills. This area is spectacularly beautiful, the Congo often imagined by outsiders — sharp hills, surging rivers, towering forests and lush paths that snake off the road into other worlds.

But soon it was a gruesome killing field.

Some victims’ genitals were cut off. Other victims were skinned. According to a Human Rights Watch report, one survivor heard members of a Luba militia cry out, “We will exterminate you all this year.”

Hundreds, if not thousands, of homes were burned. So were many schools. People fled in all directions.

Few, if any, guns were used — axes and arrows were the weapons on hand — but the government presence here is light to nonexistent. Hundreds were killed before the army arrived to intervene — which happens often in Congo.

The violence eventually cooled with the help of local officials, showing that even if Congo’s government is somewhat dysfunctional, it is better than nothing.

But thousands of people remain displaced. It is hard to imagine a more fitting symbol for this country than a cavernous abandoned cotton factory, built decades ago when there was working infrastructure, now full of seized-up machinery and hopeless people who have no other place to hide.

“We might be stuck here for years,” said Mr. Kalunga, the elder. “It’s a rotten life.”