Burundi's Buried Past, A Hazy Situation and A Fuel Scarcity in Liberia

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All international flights bound for Lagos, Nigeria, have been diverted to Ghana and Abuja following poor weather conditions and complications from new equipment installation.

The diversion was as a result of poor weather in Lagos caused by Harmattan, a haze of reddish dust which descends on the country, and inadequate equipment to check visibility.

In Novermber 2019, the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency installed Category 3 ILS at the Lagos airport - the country’s major international airport - so that flights can land at lower visibility, but the equipment was not calibrated…

The most painful part of this is how low quality our problems are.

This week, Access Bank applied to cross list a N15 billion green bond on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange (LuxSE). A green bond is a financial instrument specifically raising money for climate and environmental projects. They have become popular over the last decade with climate change rising on the agenda of many companies. When the Access Bank bond was initially issued on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) last year, it was the first ever corporate green bond issued in Africa. It will also be the first cross listing to take advantage of the NSE-LuxSE partnership to expand the green bond markets from last year. So hopefully this is a sign of more to come.

Seeming to take after his counterpart in the United States, President Buhari this week tweeted that:

This follows a series of disagreements between the ECOWAS member states following the surprise announcement in early December by eight French-speaking West African countries that they would replace their common currency with the Eco further loosening historical links with France. However, the Eco was already a project in the works with their Anglophone counterparts.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa announced efforts to break the hold of Eskom on the South African electricity sector this week.

In his state of the union address, Mr Ramaphosa highlighted a far-reaching plan to liberalize the electricity industry. That could help address chronic energy shortages and ease dependence on the national power company, which is stricken with $30 billion of debt. He also pledged spending cuts and greater control over the state wage bill.

Liberia is facing a situation most Nigerians are intimately familiar with i.e. a chronic fuel shortage. The West African country is marking one month since a chronic petrol shortage hit the country.

According to reports, the streets are deserted (queue the tumbleweed) with petrol stations the only hubs of activity as people wait in vain for a chance to buy the precious liquid. As a result, people are staying home from work and students are not going to school because of the absence of public transport.

Portugal has frozen the accounts of Africa’s richest woman Isabel dos Santos over allegations of embezzlement and corruption as discussed in previous issues. The public prosecutor’s office in Lisbon said that dozens of personal and corporate accounts belonging to Isabel dos Santos and her husband were the subject of a seizure order.

Burundi’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has found more than 6,000 bodies in six mass graves in Karusi Province, the largest finding since the government launched a nationwide excavation in January.

The commission chairman Pierre Claver Ndayicariye told journalists on Friday that the remains of 6,032 victims as well as thousands of bullets were recovered. 

Burundi’s civil war - which killed 300,000 people, ended in 2005. 

An explosive piece of investigative journalism was published by the Washington Post this week revealing a joint operation between the US and Germany. Both countries covertly owned a security and encryption company which sold software and machines to government across the world. The two governments were then privy to confidential communication going on in those countries.

What does this have to do with Africa? One of the country’s which they sold to was Nigeria, for which they had the following result:

What does this mean? Nigeria can’t even be spied on properly LMAO.

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