Month: February 2023

The authorities in Mali have begun a crackdown on hookah smoking after giving a grace period to shisha bars to adjust to a ban.

The country’s anti-drug agency says it has carried out dozens of arrests in the capital Bamako and seized water pipes after the six-month moratorium expired.

Bars where small groups of smokers — primarily young men — hang out to chat and puff on hookahs have flourished in Bamako in recent years.

But their days became numbered when the junta-dominated government on August 15 announced a surprise ban.

It warned that shisha smokers would be liable to a prison term of one to 10 days and a fine of 300 to 10,000 CFA francs ($0.45 to $15).

The Central Narcotics Office (OCS) in a Facebook posting said there had been “vigorous” raids by its agents in Bamako on Tuesday night, culminating in “about 50 individuals in prison and a large amount of seized material.”

It published photos of young men and women being taken away in the back of pickup trucks and a picture of a pile of water pipes.

“The grace period given by the authorities for importers, distributors, sellers and consumers of shisha in Mali is over,” the OCS said.

The ban has divided opinion in Mali.

The country is overwhelmingly Muslim, and interpretations of Islam are generally unfavourable to cigarettes and to shisha.

But it is also a secular nation that tolerates alcohol, even if consumption is limited to certain public places and most shops and restaurants do not serve it.

Shishas, or hookahs, typically burn tobacco flavored with fruit to provide a sweetened taste. The smoke is inhaled in through a long rubber tube, passing through water to cool it down. “Shisha” is also the term sometimes used for the tobacco product.

A working group of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned in 2017 about the danger of shisha smoking.

The practice is up to 10 times more harmful than cigarettes but is not targeted by the same awareness campaigns as with tobacco, it said.

Three years ago, amid a blaze of optimism, African leaders officially launched a new continent-wide free trade area after 17 years of haggling.

But as the leaders travel to Addis Ababa for the annual African Union summit this weekend, transforming the blockbuster pact into reality remains a tough ask.

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), billed as the biggest free trade accord in the world in terms of population, gathers 54 out of 55 African countries, with Eritrea the only holdout.

Two days of talks under the theme “Acceleration of AfCFTA implementation” open on Saturday.

AfCFTA’s plan is to boost intra-African trade by 60 percent by 2034 by eliminating almost all tariffs, creating an economic bloc of 1.3 billion people with a combined gross domestic product of $3.4 trillion.

African countries currently trade only about 15 percent of their goods and services with each other, compared to more than 65 percent with European countries.

If fully implemented, AfCFTA would lift 50 million Africans out of extreme poverty and raise incomes by nine percent by 2035, according to the World Bank.

But implementation has fallen well short of that goal, running into hurdles including disagreements over tariff reductions and border closures caused by the Covid pandemic.

Backdrop of crises

This year’s summit comes at a “delicate moment” for Africa, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank, citing Ethiopia’s nascent peace process, conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sahel region, South Sudan and jihadist insurgencies in Somalia and Mozambique.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Western sanctions that followed “have rattled African economies and left many in deep distress”, ICG adds, with food prices shooting up.

While Europe’s internal market is knitted together by energy pipelines, motorways, railways and flight routes, Africa is playing catch-up, with decrepit infrastructure and corruption handicapping the process.

Analysts say the obstacles, which range from ubiquitous red tape to the entrenched protectionism of some countries, must be overcome for Africa to achieve the coveted single market.

“There is a declared political will, but it will take a long time to put in place,” Paul-Simon Handy, regional director of the Institute for Security Studies in Addis Ababa, told Africanewsguru tv.

Dorine Nininahazwe, African Union director of US-headquartered non-profit ONE Campaign, agreed.

“There are fears from certain African countries that with opening borders, they will have an influx of people they cannot control,” Nininahazwe told Africanewsguru tv.

Address conflict-torn regions

The summit, long criticised for being ineffectual, will also aim to address the raging conflict in eastern DR Congo.

Rebels, many of them a legacy of regional wars that flared during the 1990s and the early 2000s, have sown chaos in the mineral-rich east and sparked a diplomatic row with neighbouring Rwanda, which is accused of backing the M23 militia.

The African Union scored some success in November last year in fostering a peace deal in Ethiopia between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.

Sudan, Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso, four countries that have witnessed military coups, will also be seeking to rejoin the AU.