"); NewWindow.document.close(); return false; } // end hiding from old browsers -->

IRIN Africa | West Africa | WEST AFRICA | WEST AFRICA: IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 308 covering 10-16 December 2005 | Children, Democracy, Early Warning, Economy, Education, Environment, Food Security, Gender issues, Health, HIV AIDS, Human Rights, Natural Disasters, Peace Security, Refugees IDPs, Other | Weekly

Tuesday 21 February 2006


Search

Regions

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 308 covering 10-16 December 2005

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

CONTENTS:

SIERRA LEONE: Blue helmets quit, but “peace elusive”
NIGERIA: Plane crash kills 107, mainly children, in southern city
LIBERIA: Riots erupt as Weah claims presidency
CHAD: Top brass defectors protest Deby rule
BENIN: Amid dispute on funding elections, govt buys new fleet of cars
BENIN-TOGO: Some refugees return, but 19,000 remain
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Waiting for the oil boom
NIGERIA: Fugitive governor to face UK money laundering charges

SIERRA LEONE: Blue helmets quit, but “peace elusive”

The largest UN peacekeeping operation in its time is about to wind up but despite the broad successes of the mission, war battered Sierra Leone is still at the beginning of the long road to recovery.

“If you imagine that UNAMSIL was spread over the country like a beautiful carpet, well now the time has come to roll that carpet back, and what you might find underneath may not be very good,” said Daudi Ngelautwa Mwakawago, head of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL.

In the village of Goderich, on the outskirts of the capital Freetown, blue helmets are packing up for UNAMSIL’s end of December departure after successfully restoring peace to a country wracked by a decade of the most brutal civil warfare in West Africa.

“Peace has come,” beamed Captain Parvez Chowdhury, of the fifth Battalion of Bangladeshi peacekeepers among some 8,000 Bangladeshi troops rotated through Sierra Leone.

“We were worried there may be some incidents such as looting when we started pulling out, but no such thing has happened, even in remote places,” he said as behind him troops dismantled the temporary structures they erected five years ago.

Full report

[SIERRA LEONE: Corruption may be illegal, but no one’s giving it up yet]

[Top of the Page]

NIGERIA: Plane crash kills 107, mainly children, in southern city

In the second air disaster in Nigeria in less than two months, an airplane crashed while landing in a storm this weekend in the southern oil industry centre of Port Harcourt, killing 107 people, most of them secondary school pupils from the capital, Abuja.

The DC-9 Sosoliso Airline jet with 110 people on board was on a flight from Abuja to Port Harcourt on Saturday afternoon, with a brief stop in the southeastern city of Enugu. At the crash scene in Port Harcourt 103 people were confirmed dead immediately; four of the seven survivors died later in hospital.

It was the second major air accident in the country in under two months. A Bellview airliner crashed on 22 October soon after taking off from Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, killing all 117 people on board.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Abuja, John Onaiyekan, said 71 pupils of the church-run Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College died in the Sosoliso crash, of the 75 who boarded. Four of the students disembarked in Enugu.

The international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said two of its aid workers, one from France, the other from the United States, also died in the crash.

Full report

[NIGERIA: Airlines grounded, aviation overhaul ordered after crash]

[Top of the Page]

LIBERIA: Riots erupt as Weah claims presidency

Former football superstar and loser of Liberia’s first post-war elections, George Weah, claimed the presidency this weekend in a series of rabble-rousing speeches that sparked rioting in the battered capital Monrovia.

Several policemen were reported to be badly hurt and at least 40 arrested in the trouble on Sunday.

Weah’s verbal onslaught began as soon as he was off a plane, fresh from visiting presidents John Kufuor of Ghana and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who have been urging the onetime FIFA world footballer of the year to concede defeat gracefully.

“I am President of this country, whether you like it or not, it will not change. I told President Mbeki this. I repeat that I was cheated in the elections,” Weah told reporters on Sunday afternoon.

Weah lost to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in the second round run-off of Liberia’s first post-war presidential elections on the 8 November but has refused to accept her victory claiming large scale rigging and fraud in the UN-organised poll.

Full report

[LIBERIA: Poll authorities throw out Weah fraud claims]

[Top of the Page]

CHAD: Top brass defectors protest Deby rule

Chad President Idriss Deby marked 15 years at the helm of the vast arid nation this weekend amid reports of new defections by members of his inner circle as well as the military.

Army and government sources on Monday said key local government officials as well as several officers had deserted their posts at the weekend, swelling the ranks of rebel forces hiding out in the sandy eastern stretches of the oil-producing nation.

And in a written statement handed to the media, two of his nephews and ex senior aides, Tom and Timane Erdimi, who respectively held top jobs in the country’s oil and cotton sectors, said they were joining those bent on evicting Deby from office.

“Today many Chadians are struggling in various ways and means against the Deby regime, we join them without regret,” they said in the statement.

For the past two months a group of anti-Deby soldiers-turned-rebels has operated in the volatile region bordering Sudan’s Western Darfur under the name of SCUD, which stands for “Platform for Change, National Unity and Democracy”.

Full report

[Top of the Page]

BENIN: Amid dispute on funding elections, govt buys new fleet of cars

After announcing a shortage of funds in state coffers to finance next year’s presidential election in Benin, the government has said it nonetheless plans to purchase of a new fleet of 237 luxury vehicles.

The head of the Finance Ministry’s equipment and logistics service, Roland Zinzindohoue, said last week that the new tax-free vehicles - Mitsubishis, four-wheel drive Pajeros and Peugeots - were being purchased at 80 percent of cost as they had been used during the France-Africa summit that took place in the Malian capital Bamako, 2 to 4 December.

The almost-factory-new fleet would thus cost Benin 2.89 billion CFA francs (US $5.3 million), allowing the government to partially update its fleet of 1,650 vehicles at a saving of 621 million CFA francs (US $1.1 million).

In comparison, presidential elections scheduled to take place in March 2006 are expected to cost the country 32.5 billion CFA francs (US $59 million), an amount Benin simply does not have, according to a statement in parliament last month by Finance Minister Cosme Sehlin.

Sehlin said the country was in the red due to a lingering economic crisis aggravated by hiking oil prices, a fall in cotton prices, the country’s main export, and the burden of caring for more than 20,000 refugees from political tension in neighbouring Togo.

But in a rare development on Wednesday this week, staff at the Finance Ministry countered the minister’s claim of empty coffers, saying that although the year had not ended, 80 percent of government revenues had been collected.

Full report

[Top of the Page]

BENIN-TOGO: Some refugees return, but 19,000 remain

While some of the refugees who streamed across the border from Togo into Benin by the thousands last April have finally gone home, more than 19,000 are still in exile, according to the UN refugee agency.

The UNHCR, which is updating data on the refugee situation in Benin, said 10,960 people were registered in its Come and Agame refugee camps, while 8,130 refugees from this year’s eruption of political tension in Togo were living in the capital Cotonou, or elsewhere in the country.

The agency estimated last August that a total 24,500 refugees had fled east from Togo into Benin following unrest triggered by a disputed presidential poll on 24 April. A further 15,000 went west into Ghana.

The government of newly-elected President Faure Gnassingbe has repeatedly called on the refugees to return in the name of national reconciliation.

Floods of people thronged across the tiny country’s borders late April as violence degenerated into urban warfare in the capital, Lome, when Gnassingbe was declared winner of a poll the opposition claimed was rigged.

Full report

[Top of the Page]

SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Waiting for the oil boom

Beatriz Azevedo points to a woman carrying a plastic bowl of fish on her head as she wades chest deep through a river where it flows into the sea.

This river separates the coastal village of Sao Joao dos Angolares from a nearby beach where fishermen beach their canoes.

“Two men were drowned in recent months while trying to carry their outboard motors across this river, says Azevedo, the head of the local women’s association.

“When the oil money comes in we are going to build a bridge here.”

Everyone in Sao Tome and Principe is convinced that this small island state tucked away in the Gulf of Guinea is on the verge of an oil boom.

Full report

[Top of the Page]

[SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Attorney General finds ‘serious flaws’ in the award of oil exploration contracts]

NIGERIA: Fugitive governor to face UK money laundering charges

President Olusegun Obasanjo said Nigeria will comply with the UK authorities and hand over a prominent state governor charged with money laundering who evaded British police disguised as a woman.

“As a member of Interpol…Nigeria will take the appropriate action as required by the British authorities on this matter,” Obasanjo said on Saturday.

Nigerian police arrested the governor of oil-rich Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, at his office on Friday after state legislators voted by a two-thirds majority to oust him for corruption and abuse of position.

Alamieyeseigha’s impeachment effectively ended his immunity from prosecution as a state governor and cleared the way for the armed Nigerian officers who had surrounded his offices to make an arrest.

British Police originally arrested Alamieyeseigha at Heathrow Airport in September while en route to Nigeria from Germany and charged him with laundering 1.8 million British pounds (over US $3 million) found in his London home.

But Alamieyeseigha skipped bail and, donning a dress and wig, used a false passport to board a plane back to Nigeria.

Full report

[Top of the Page]

[ENDS]

Theme(s)	Children

Other recent WEST AFRICA reports:

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 317 covering 11-17 February 2006, 17/Feb/06

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 316 covering 4-10 February 2006, 10/Feb/06

Africa’s poorest nations fight to ward off deadly bird flu, 9/Feb/06

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 315 covering 28 January – 3 February 2006, 3/Feb/06

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 314 covering 21-27 January 2006, 27/Jan/06

Other recent Children reports:

IRAQ: Thousands of families still displaced after flooding, 21/Feb/06

SOUTH AFRICA: Govt adopts more focused approach to help orphans, 21/Feb/06

YEMEN: Two killed in flash floods, 21/Feb/06

YEMEN: Measles vaccination campaign launched to prevent children’s deaths, 21/Feb/06

TAJIKISTAN: UN appeal for 2006 launched, 16/Feb/06

[Back] [Home Page]

Click here to send any feedback, comments or questions you have about IRIN's Website or if you prefer you can send an Email to Webmaster

Copyright © IRIN 2006
The material contained on www.IRINnews.org comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies.
All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the IRIN copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.