Month: August 2023

The port and tourist city of Cape Town has been paralysed for several days by a collective taxi strike, which has taken a violent turn in South Africa’s largest city with three deaths reported, the police announced on Monday.

Thousands of commuters were stranded after a work stoppage on Thursday by drivers of minibuses, the main means of transport for millions of working-class South Africans, who are blocking many roads.

On Monday, on the road to the airport, “one person was shot and three others injured” after throwing stones at a motorist, the police said.

The authorities then said that another body, that of a 28-year-old man who had died from several gunshot wounds in an attack “presumed to be linked to taxis”, had been found nearby.

On Friday evening, a policeman was shot dead while on patrol some twenty kilometres from Cape Town.

Here again, “we cannot rule out the possibility that this attack was linked to the ongoing taxi strike”, commented the police, as officers were “patrolling to contain incidents linked” to the strike.

The airport road, which had been regularly disrupted and blocked the previous night, was finally cleared on Monday afternoon.

The British Embassy in South Africa posted a notice on Facebook last weekend advising travellers to delay their journeys “to and from the airport until the route has been cleared”.

Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille told our source on Monday that she was discussing the taxi strike with the Premier of Cape Town Province “in the light of the note sent by the British authorities”, with a view to finding a rapid solution.

The South African National Taxi Council (Santaco) had called a walkout last week to protest against a new regulation that gives the Cape Town municipality the power to seize vehicles for offences such as driving without a licence, failing to display number plates and overloading.

The situation escalated after 15 minibuses were seized on Tuesday.

Santaco said on Monday that 6,000 vehicles had been seized since the start of the year and that, faced with this situation, it had “no other option” than to call a strike.”It is clear that there has been a degree of premeditation in the actions we have witnessed over the last few days.

There have also been clear attempts to target the city’s staff and infrastructure”, commented the local authorities in their statement.

“It is clear that there has been a degree of premeditation in the actions we have witnessed in recent days. There have also been clear attempts to target city staff and infrastructure”, commented the local authorities in their statement on Monday.

Numerous buses and municipal vehicles have been set on fire, private vehicles have been the target of stone-throwing and gunfire, and clinics have had to close or reduce their capacity because of the chaos.

Shops were looted, according to the police, who announced the arrest of five suspected looters. Following the failure of weekend negotiations with Santaco, it announced that the work stoppage would continue until Wednesday.

Malawi tobacco regulators have hinted at a 55% increase in the sale of the product amounting to $282 million compared to $182 million last year.

Despite the increase, this year’s sales are still lower compared to previous years when they hit over $350 million.

Production was lower last year because the Southern African country lacked enough dollar reserves in order to import various agricultural inputs like fertilizers and even fuel.

Malawi’s Tobacco Commission Spokesperson said this year’s production which is more than $121 million has been improved by the good weather.

Malawi is one of the lowest income countries but a major tobacco producer, ranking first in the world for burley and seventh for overall production.

No other economy is more dependent on the leaf. Government statistics say over 70 percent of the nation’s export income comes from tobacco.

Returns from tobacco, dubbed the ‘Malawi’s Green Gold’, have dwindled over the past decade due to declining global demands driven by anti-smoking campaigns.

Twenty people were killed in Burkina Faso on Sunday in an attack by suspected jihadists in Nohao, near the town of Bittou, in the Center-East region bordering Togo, Africanewsguru.com learned on Monday.

“The attack killed around twenty people, mainly shopkeepers,” a security source told Africanewsguru,com. A trader reports for his part a balance sheet of “25 people killed” and “more than fifteen transport trucks looted and then set on fire by the terrorists”.

Another merchant reported “ten wounded”, evacuated to Bittou, where traders were returning after going to the market in Cinkansé, a trading town on the Togo border.

“We deplore the loss of life whose bodies were deposited” at “the morgue of the CHR (Regional Hospital Center) of Tenkodogo”, capital of the Center-East region, said in a press release a local official, Sami Beranger Pooda, who does not specify any figures.

Another attack occurred “Thursday around 6 p.m.”, according to the same security source, and “targeted a convoy of several dozen vehicles carrying goods”.

Since 2015, Burkina has been caught in a spiral of violence perpetrated by jihadist groups affiliated with the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda. action (Acled), including more than 5,000 since the start of 2023.

This violence has also led to the displacement of more than two million people inside the country.

In mid-July, President and Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who came to power in September 2022 by a coup d’etat, deplored “increasingly recurrent attacks against civilians”, believing that the jihadists were showing “cowardice”.

A minibus plunged into a ravine in Morocco on Sunday, killing all 24 people on board in one of the North African country’s worst-ever road accidents, officials said.

The passengers were travelling a mountainous route to a weekly market in the town of Demnate, in the central province of Azilal, when the minibus overturned on a bend, the local authorities said.

Images on public broadcaster 2M showed the vehicle crushed at the bottom of the ravine.

“All the passengers are dead,” Youssef Makhloufi, director of the Demnate hospital, told 2M, which reported that at least two women and a child were among the victims.

Local authorities said an investigation has begun.

Omar Majjane, who works for a local NGO, said the minibu**s “didn’t have a licence, and it’s a problem that affects the residents of mountain regions, particularly in Azilal province”.**

He told Africanewsguru.com the fatalities were all from the town of Ait Tamlil in the High Atlas Mountains south of Demnate.

“The operation to bury the victims has begun,” he said.

Accidents are frequent on the roads of Morocco and other North African countries, which see thousands of road deaths annually.

Eleven people, mostly agricultural workers, died in March when their minibus slammed into a tree after the driver lost control in the rural town of Brachoua, local officials said at the time.

Many poorer citizens use coaches and minibuses to travel in rural areas.

In August last year, 23 people were killed and 36 injured when their bus overturned on a bend east of Morocco’s economic capital Casablanca.

An average of 3,500 road deaths and 12,000 injuries are recorded annually in Morocco, according to the National Road Safety Agency, with an average of 10 deaths per day.

The figure last year was around 3,200.

Authorities have set out to halve the mortality rate by 2026 ever since the worst bus accident in the country’s history left 42 dead in 2012.

In neighbouring Algeria, 34 people were killed on July 19 when a passenger bus collided head-on with a pickup truck carrying fuel cans and burst into flames, deep in the southern Sahara region, officials said.

It was the country’s deadliest road crash in years and also left 12 others injured, many with severe burns, Algeria’s civil defence agency said.

One of Tunisia’s worst road accidents occurred in 2019 when a bus plunged into a ravine, killing at least 24 Tunisians and injuring 18 others.

Libya’s roads have ranked among the deadliest in the world.

The Libyan interior ministry’s traffic department recorded 4,115 road accidents across the country in 2018, with 2,500 people killed and more than 3,000 others injured.

About 7,000 people lost their lives on the roads of Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, in 2020, according to official figures.

An influential Malian woman was sentenced on Wednesday to a year’s imprisonment after speaking out against the ruling military and its “failure” to deal with insecurity and inflation, according to her lawyer.

She must also pay a fine of one million Francs cfa (1,500 euros). “We have appealed,” Rokia Doumbia’s lawyer, Kassoum Tapo, told our source by telephone.

Under the colonial regime that has been in power in Mali since 2020, it is difficult for dissenting voices to make themselves heard without the risk of being worried. This Sahelian country is confronted with multifaceted violence, including jihadist attacks.

Rokia Doumbia, known in Mali for her commitment to fighting the high cost of living and with a strong following on social networks, was charged with “insulting the Head of State”, “inciting revolt” and “disturbing public order through the use of information and communication technologies”.

“In March, she launched a “live” message on TikTok addressed to the head of the junta, Colonel Assimi Goïta, before being imprisoned.

“This transition is a failure with 0% (of results). I wouldn’t even give 1%, but 0%”, she had declared, referring to the period of military government that was supposed to precede the return, announced for 2024, of civilians at the head of the country.

“No Malian lives in peace”, she added, even though the authorities regularly claim to have regained the initiative against the jihadists. “Insecurity is gaining ground everywhere”, she said.

A person close to Rokia Doumbia, who spoke on condition of anonymity like many of her interlocutors, said that she had been reported to the authorities by the Collectif pour la défense des militaires (CDM). Appeals from this organization, one of the junta’s most offensive supporters, are often followed up.