Month: March 2023

A journalist from a private Senegalese television station was charged with “contempt of court” and “spreading false news” and jailed Tuesday night, Africanewsguru tv learned Wednesday from his lawyer.

Pape Ndiaye, a columnist for Wal Fadjri, had recently questioned the independence of the judiciary in the January 18 referral to a criminal chamber of the opponent Ousmane Sonko, accused of rape by an employee of a beauty salon.

The journalist had claimed that the majority of the judges of the public prosecutor’s office had decided in favor of dismissing Mr. Sonko’s case, against the advice, according to him, of the public prosecutor who told them to fulfill the government’s wish for a trial of the opponent.

“The information (on the indictment and imprisonment of Pape Ndiaye) is accurate,” Moussa Sarr, his lawyer, told Africanewsguru tv on Wednesday, confirming information provided by the Coordination of Press Associations (CAP), a trade union confederation.

The charges against the journalist are “provocation of a gathering, contempt of court, intimidation, and reprisals against a member of the judiciary, discrediting a judicial act, dissemination of false news, endangering the lives of others,” according to Mr. Sarr.

The Sonko case has been a source of tension for at least two years in Senegal. The opponent was charged with rape and death threats and placed under judicial supervision in March 2021, on the complaint of the employee of the beauty salon where he was getting a massage.

He denounced a plot by the government to torpedo his candidacy for the 2024 presidential elections.

Pape Ndiaye is the second journalist to be imprisoned in recent months in Senegal after Pape Alé Niang.

This journalist from the news website Dakar matin, a critic of the government, was arrested twice in November and December for, among other things, “disclosing information likely to harm the national defense” and “spreading false news”, also around the Sonko case. He has since been placed under judicial supervision.

Senegal is ranked 73rd (out of 180) in the 2022 edition of the world press freedom index compiled by the journalists’ rights organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

The sight of a red bloodstain on Kenyan Senator Gloria Orwoba’s white pantsuit was so startling that a female security guard rushed over to hide it.

It was an accident, Orwoba said. Just before walking into parliament, she looked down to discover that she had been caught unprepared by her monthly period.

For a moment, she considered retreat. But then she thought about how the stigma around menstruation affects Kenyan women and girls and strode into the building. To those who noticed the stain, she explained she was making a statement.

It didn’t last long. Within minutes, colleagues in the senate became so uncomfortable that another female lawmaker petitioned the speaker to ask Orwoba to leave and change her clothes. Male colleagues agreed, calling the issue “taboo and private,” and Orwoba walked out.

A male colleague accused her of faking her accident in parliament, to which she replied in a local media interview that “everyone would rather think it’s a prank because if it is a prank then it’s acting and that way it doesn’t exist in the real world. Yet our girls are suffering.”

Whether or not Orwoba’s menstrual stain was an accident or a stunt, the controversy it has elicited shows the considerable stigma that surrounds women’s periods in Kenya and in many African countries.

Orwoba hasn’t been silenced. The incident last month has inspired considerable debate in Kenya about “period shaming” of women and the problem of the lack of access to sanitary pads for schoolgirls and others in many African countries.

Inspired, some of Orwoba’s friends have even paid for a billboard in the capital, Nairobi, that shows her in a white T-shirt with the words “I can do bleeding” — a spirited message against menstrual stigma in the largely conservative country.

In an interview with The Associated Press, the bubbly first-time senator acknowledged that the incident has prompted her to concentrate on drafting a bill calling on the Kenyan government to provide an annual supply of sanitary pads to all schoolgirls and incarcerated women.

“For legislators to feel the urgency of legislating things into law, they must be subjected to the advocacy and the noise,” she said of her public campaign.

The 36-year-old said she has never understood why menstruation is spoken of like a secret. She recalled being excited as a teenager to finally have her first period after being the last among her peers to get the “mark of womanhood.”

“My attitude toward menstruation since then has been open,” said Orwoba, who has warned her teenage son to never shame a girl for having her period.

Studies have shown that menstruation causes widespread absences from school in many African countries by girls who stay home for fear of staining their uniforms.

In 2019, one schoolgirl in Kenya killed herself after a teacher called her dirty and kicked her out of class.

One in 10 African schoolgirls misses school during menstruation, according to a U.N. survey, and many, after lagging behind, eventually drop out.

Official efforts and promises to provide sanitary pads have fallen short. In Kenya, the government increased budget funds to distribute pads to schoolgirls in 2018 but the amount was halved the next year.

Neighboring Tanzania removed taxes on sanitary pads to make them more affordable, but many still find them too expensive because of high production and import costs.

Now Orwoba receives calls from organizations that want to make menstruation products accessible to the poor, including a British firm that wants to put up sanitary pad dispensers in public toilets. Such dispensers for condoms have long been common in public toilets across Kenya as part of national campaigns against HIV.

In recent years, Kenya has seen the introduction of reusable menstruation products like washable pads and silicon cups. But the lack of access to water to clean them in some rural communities has prevented some users from embracing them.

Virginia Mwongeli, 24, sells menstruation cups in Nairobi and thinks Orwoba’s bold move will help end period shaming.

“We need to normalize periods,” she said.

The senator’s decision to walk into parliament with stained pants was “totally acceptable as people need to openly discuss menstruation,” said Lorna Mweu, popularly known as Mamake Bobo, who founded Period Party, an organization that holds an annual event in Kenya to help end stigma.

Orwoba said she longs for the day when accidental period stains will be seen as normal, not shameful. Women and girls are using up valuable sanitary pads by wearing them as a precaution out of anxiety, she said: “That’s a whole pack that you’ve wasted because of the fear of staining your clothes.”

As the world marks the International Women’s Day, the Burundian women are scaling up their roles in the society by encroaching the male dominated industries.

For instance Nahayo Dorothee is a bricklayer assistant at a local construction site in Bujumbura, a profession that is male dominated in many countries around the world.

To her, the international women’s day has been a reckon to even work harder to alienate poverty in her family

“Yes, I hear that International Women’s Day is coming but because of poverty I cannot proudly celebrate this day. The 5,000frbu (approx $2.40) that I earn per day cannot be enough for me to celebrate this day and say that I am a proud woman among others, no it is not possible,” said Dorothée.

Another woman by the name Rehema has been making a living as a barber attending to men’s haircuts in Bujumbura.

She revealed that she has been despised and rejected by especially male who are seeking services. She has instead double up her efforts to be recognized.

“Sometimes a client comes in and says he can’t get his hair cut by a woman. This has never discouraged me from giving up my work, but I double my effort. When that customer comes back and finds me cutting another customer’s hair he will see that I cut well and he will accept that I cut his,” said Rehema.

To mark International Women’s Day, capitals across the world are hosting marches, rallies and demonstrations to advocate for women’s rights.

In Africa, majority of women work in insecure, poorly paid jobs, with few opportunities for advancement according to the United Nations.

A fire, which the government says was arson, caused minor material damage Monday in a brewery owned by French alcohol giant Castel in the Central African Republic.

In the middle of the night, incendiary devices set fire to equipment in the heart of the MOCAF brewery (an acronym for Motte Cordonnier Afrique).

“It is an arson attack, so the government must open an investigation today to find out the origin,” Serge Ghislain Djorie, Minister of Communication and government spokesman, assured Africanewsguru tv by telephone.

The French ambassador, Jean-Marc Grosgurin, went in the morning on the spot “to mark his solidarity with the employees and the direction” following this “arson”, indicates the diplomatic representation on its Facebook page.

The diplomat thanked the rescue services “which have significantly limited the material damage”, says the embassy.

Neither the government, nor the French embassy, nor the management of MOCAF, wished to give details of the attack. No journalists were allowed to enter the site on Monday.

The Castel group, the embassy, NGOs and other French companies are targeted by smear campaigns, even threats from influential groups.

Castel acquired MOCAF in 1993, which has been present in the Central African Republic since 1953. This subsidiary is one of the largest producers and employers in the country.

The Central African Republic, the second least developed country in the world according to the UN, has been in the grip of a civil war since 2013, which has however largely diminished in intensity since 2018.