| UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA - AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER |
tel: +225 21 73 54 fax: +22521 63 35 e-mail: irin-wa africaonline.co.ci
IRIN-WA Update 316 of Events in West Africa (Wednesday 14 October 1998)
NIGERIA: Exiled Soyinka due home later today
Exiled Nobel Literature laureate Wole Soyinka flew back home from his US exile today (Wednesday), almost four years after fleeing the military rule of the late General Sani Abacha. News reports said his plane would arrive later today.
"We are expecting him at arrive a little after seven p.m. (1800 GMT)," a Reuters report quoted an official at Murtala Mohammed International Airport as saying.
Soyinka fled in 1994 after Abacha banned him from travelling. He was prominent in pro-democracy demonstrations in Nigeria and for recognition of Moshood Abiola as the winner of the 1993 elections, annulled by the military government of Ibrahim Babangida.
General Abdulsalami Abubakar met Soyinka recently in New York and obtained an undertaking from the 1986 Nobel prize winner that he would return. Abubakar has dropped all treason charges against Soyinka and other exiles, freed political prisoners, set a timetable for the return to civil rule by May 1999. Soyinka has been teaching at Emory University in Atlanta.
Three nations in joint operations against Chadian rebels
Chad, Niger and Nigeria are conducting joint military operations to flush out Chadian rebels in northern Nigeria, state radio reported today quoting a military spokesman in Abuja.
"The operation is being conducted along the Lake Chad region, where the rebels are believed to have their bases," Lieutenant Colonel Sam Tella said. The rebels, he said, crossed into Nigeria years ago following problems in Chad.
GUINEA BISSAU: UN says people return to capital
A UN Inter-agency mission that visited Guinea Bissau recently found that "a significant number" of people had returned to the capital, Bissau. WFP said in its latest weekly report that about 60-70 percent of the internally displaced people had returned to Bissau from the Bafata region.
However, it said the mission could not confirm the current number of people in Bissau, estimated at 200,000 by the Swedish Embassy. The mission said small businesses had reopened and that telephones, electricity and water supplies were functioning.
The mission was composed of OCHA, WFP, WHO, UNICEF, UNHCR and UNDP. They visited Bafata, Gabu, Canchungo, Jolmete, Mansoa and Bissau from 28 September to 2 October.
SIERRA LEONE: Child soldier registration starts
Child protection agencies in Sierra Leone have started registering hundreds of child soldiers in preparation for the launch of a demobilisation programme brokered earlier this month during the visit of UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy to the region, humanitarian sources told IRIN.
UNICEF in Sierra Leone said today that it had implemented a programme in partnership with the Ministry of Social Welfare, Gender and Children's Affairs to register as many of Sierra Leone's child soldiers as possible based on a set of principles agreed between Bellamy and President Alhaji Ahmad Tejan Kabbah.
Bellamy had also won the support of Defence Minister Chief Hinga Norman, who heads one of Sierra Leone's largest groups of traditional Kamajor hunter-militia, which have frequently used child soldiers to fight rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), UNICEF said.
Nevertheless, a spokesperson added that the demobilisation programme was not moving as quickly as anticipated, with less than 100 children so far demobilised. Media reports have also commented on the continued challenges facing agencies in persuading the Kamajors to release child fighters, whose "purity" - they believe - mystically protects them from bullets.
Camp distributions completed
CARE International completed distribution earlier this week of an expanded vulnerable group feeding (VGF) cycle for over 41,000 displaced and local people in the Masingbi area of northern Sierra Leone.
CARE told IRIN today that over 690 mt of bulgar wheat, lentils and oil had been successfully delivered to beneficiaries. However, CARE had already started a second supplementary distribution of corn-soya-blend (CSB) biscuits to ensure people could stagger consumption of its main food basket throughout the month.
Speaking from CARE Sierra Leone's main office in Freetown, acting country director Nick Webber added that CARE had expected to help some 38,000 beneficiaries. He added the agency had also had to include local people in the distribution, whose coping capacities had been strained by hosting such a large displaced population.
He said distributions for the month of October would be starting next week, but warned eventual reductions in food aid to Masingbi were "entirely dependent" on improvements in the security situation in the north and the east of the country, where the Nigerian-led West African intervention force, ECOMOG, has been fighting the RUF.
LIBERIA: MSF to shut down emergency hospital
Medecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) told IRIN today it had agreed with Liberia's ministry of health to shut down its main emergency hospital in the capital, Monrovia. MSF's head of mission in Liberia Edwin Vandenburg said the international medical agency had been looking for a more permanent solution to central Monrovia's hospital needs since October last year, but had not found a satisfactory alternative.
He said Liberia's government had favoured rehabilitating Monrovia's main John F Kennedy Memorial hospital, but the work needed was beyond available resources. Use of a former children's hospital, located near the MSF-run Swederelief facility, was also ruled out when the ministry of health took over the building to use as offices, MSF said.
The only remaining sustainable option, Vandenburg said, was to support the ministry's Redemption Hospital, also on Bushrod Island, but with only 50 beds it was the capacity of that of Swederelief. Aid agency staff, who worked in Liberia during the seven-year civil war, told IRIN that the MSF-hospital would be badly missed. "It not only saved a lot of lives, but it was also a symbol of sanctuary during some of the worst parts of the war," one aid worker said.
WEST AFRICA: Socio-economic costs of corruption enormous, reports say
Corruption and bribery hinder national economies, impede economic development in numerous countries and often result in human rights violations, according to several recent UN and US reports. A UN press release quoted a representative of Austria, speaking yesterday on behalf of the European Union and associated countries, to the Second Committee of the UN General Assembly, as saying that corruption raised transaction costs and uncertainty in an economy. He added that corruption also led to "inefficient economic outcomes and undermined the State's legitimacy", while the victims of corruption were usually the poor.
Meanwhile, the US representative noted that the mushrooming of international trade and investment had brought the issue of corruption to centre stage. Governments were now addressing such issues as bank secrecy provisions and mutual assistance legislation in a bid to curb corruption, he added. The UN Second Committee deals with economic and development matters.
Abidjan 14 October 1998 18:00 GMT
[ENDS]
[The material contained in this communication comes to you via IRIN West Africa, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. UN IRIN-WA Tel: +225 21 73 66 Fax: +225 21 63 35 e-mail: irin-wa@africaonline.co.ci for more information or subscription. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this report, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. IRIN reports are archived on the Web at: http://www.reliefweb.int or can be retrieved automatically by sending e-mail to <archive@ocha.unon.org> - mailing list: irin-wa-updates]
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1998 18:45:04 +0000 (GMT) From: UN IRIN - West Africa <irin-wa@wa.dha.unon.org> Subject: IRIN-West Africa Update 316 for 1998.10.14 Message-Id: <Pine.LNX.3.95.981014184402.27998A-100000@wa.dha.unon.org>
Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar
| Previous Menu | Home Page | What's New | Search | Country Specific |