Tag: Uganda

African Nations Squeezing Congo

The United Nations didn’t make any friends in releasing a report accusing highly placed political and military officials in the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe of setting up criminal cartels to exploit mineral and gem resources in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe withdrew their armed forces from the DR Congo as part of an agreement to bring a halt to that country’s civil war. But the United Nations report maintains that the military officials who were using their armies to strip DR Congo of precious minerals and gems have simply set up deeply entrenched criminal organizations to accomplish the same thing in their absence.

According to the report,

Three distinct criminal groups linked to the armies of Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe and the Government of the DRC have benefited from overlapping micro-conflicts [and] will not disband voluntarily even as the foreign military forces continue their withdrawals.

. . .

The looting that was previously conducted by the armies themselves has been replaced with organised systems of embezzlement, tax fraud, extortion, the use of stock options as kickbacks and diversion of state funds conducted by groups that closely resemble criminal organizations.

The report cites 54 specific individuals and recommends a variety of actions be taken against them, such as freezing their assets and barring them for travel, if they do not cease such activities within a few months.

Of course the real problem is less that these individuals are willing to pay large bribes and use other means to gain access to the DR Congo’s wealth, but rather that the DR Congo government is so weak and corrupt that this appears to be the normal, accepted way of doing business in that country.

The reaction of the African nations was predictable — the report was all lies. After all, who ever heard of official corruption on the African continent?

Source:

Focus on UN Panel report on the plunder of the Congo. UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, October 21, 2002.

Africa fury at U.N. looting report. Reuters, October 22, 2002.

States set up cartels to plunder Congo UN. Jonathan Katzenellenbogen, Business Day (Johannesburg), October 22, 2002.

First Quantum denies U.N. accusations on Congo. Reuters, October 22, 2002.

Was Uganda’s AIDS Success a Fraud?

In June 2002 Uganda was hailed for its apparently amazing success at lowering HIV infections. President Yoweri Museveni announced that the rate of HIV infection was down from 30 percent in 1990 to just 6.1 percent in 2001. But this month The Lancet published a report questioning the validity of those claims.

Justin Parkhurst of the London School of Hygeine reported in The Lancet that Uganda used a number of questionable statistical practices to create the appearance that AIDS infections had declined so dramatically.

Among other things, Uganda relied on a small number of reports from urban clinics and then extrapolated from those figures, even though 87 percent of Uganda’s population is rural. Uganda officials also apparently used the rate of prevalence as the rate of infection, even though prevalence rates are subject to fluctuations when people with the disease die.

Parkhurst concluded that, “Statements of success have often been based on misinterpretation of epidemiological data, and can sometimes not be supported when all the Ugandan evidence is assessed . . . Unfounded claims of Ugandan success have persisted in international policy discourse.”

Source:

Uganda: Row over HIV/AIDS success story. Africa Online, August 26, 2002.

Zimbabwe, Genocide and AIDS

Glenn Reynolds links to an article speculating that Zimbabwe might be on the verge of heading down the same path that Idi Amin’s Uganda took. But the scary thing is that even without that sort of problem, the long term result of Robert Mugabe’s tyranny is going to be unbelievably high numbers of deaths in Zimbabwe due to something that’s been a bit overlooked — the AIDS crisis.

Yes, millions of people in Zimbabwe are at risk of starvation and political violence is likely to rise, but even if those two outcomes are averted, Zimbabwe is headed toward an HIV Holocaust.

In July the United Nations released a report on AIDS in Africa claiming that by 2020, more than 68 million people in Africa will likely die from AIDS. And Zimbabwe is the poster child for the epidemic.

In 1997, an estimated 25 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe were HIV positive. While Mugabe fiddled about with seizing white farms and jailing opposition parties and journalists, that figure jumped to an estimated 33 percent of all adults in Zimbabwe being HIV positive.

Other countries, such as Botswana, have larger estimated rates of infection, and certainly places like South Africa have dragged their feet at dealing with the epidemic, but at the moment Zimbabwe seems the leading candidate for the nightmare scenario where AIDS all but wipes out a large nation. If Mugabe is able to hold on to power like Mobutu did in Zaire and Amin did in Uganda, by the end of the decade Zimbabwe will likely be looking at HIV infection rates in excess of 50 percent of the adult population and with no end or solution in sight.

Kenya and Uganda to Test Malaria Early Warning System

British researchers are helping Kenya and Uganda put together an early warning system that should allow medical authorities in those countries to react quicker and head off possible malaria outbreaks.

Over a million people die every year from malaria related complications, and one reason so many people die is that few people have immunity to malaria. Typically large numbers of people die when malaria epidemics break out in areas where the disease is not common.

Tarekegn Abeku of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told the BBC, “Most people don’t have immunity to malaria, so all the adult population and the children are affected. So the mortality rate can be very high in these areas when epidemic occur.”

Abeku is helping Kenya and Uganda predict when and where outbreaks are likely to occur through a combination of weather and disease monitoring.

On the weather side of things, unexpected malaria outbreaks tend to occur due to shifting weather patterns. According to Abeku,

Mainly, these epidemics are related to changes in weather conditions so we are also trying to set up data collection systems to collect material — meteorological data — that we can link with this morbidity data. We will use this information to develop a system that can be used for forecasting the average weather conditions and to use that to predict the probability of occurrence of epidemics.

In addition, health facilities will report malaria cases and death rates every week to health management teams which will be used with the weather data to predict any possible epidemics.

When researchers believe that conditions are right for an outbreak, they will treat people in the area for malaria in order to reduce the level of malaria parasite in the local population as well as possibly using insecticide to lower the mosquito population.

If the system proves successful in preventing malaria outbreaks, it could be used in other developing countries where malaria is a serious health problem.

Source:

Africa gets malaria early warning system. The BBC, May 5, 2002.