Author: Agencies

BY ANSELM KIZZA-BESIGYE Ugandan queer feminist anthropologist, poet, and activist Stella Nyanzi was arrested in November 2018 for violating the Computer Misuse Act when she posted a poem on the occasion of President Yoweri Museveni’s birthday in which she wishes he had been “prematurely miscarried just like [he] prematurely aborted any semblance of democracy, good governance and rule of law. “The portions of the poem which were used to indict Nyanzi, and around which much of her case revolved, were those in which she made repeated reference to the president’s mother’s vagina, describing it in rather vulgar terms. Refusing bail, Nyanzi had already been imprisoned for almost…

It’s hard for many of us to imagine a world without instant, limitless internet access. Some have even argued that it should, alongside access to clean water and electricity, be considered a basic human right. But in fact only 64.4% of the global population as of January 2023 are internet users. Asia and Europe are home to most of the people who are connected. Africa comes in third. However, accessibility varies wildly across the continent. About 66% of people in southern Africa are internet users. In east Africa the figure is 26%; it is just 24% in central Africa. People in rural areas have…

Bola Ahmed Tinubu was on Wednesday declared the winner of Nigeria’s controversial presidential elections, as opposition leaders decried the polls as rigged and called for a fresh vote. Tinubu, 70, represents the ruling All Progressives Congress party, which received close to 8.8 million votes – about 36.6% of the total, according to Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chairman Mahmood Yakubu. He defeated vice president Atiku Abubakar of the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and popular third force candidate Peter Obi, who has gained in popularity among young people in particular. In an acceptance speech, Tinubu thanked voters and said he…

A French civil court ruled on Tuesday that a lawsuit brought by campaigners against energy major TotalEnergies over its oil projects in Uganda and Tanzania was inadmissible. Under the case filed in 2019, six French and Ugandan activist groups had accused the company of not doing all it could to protect people and the environment from the Tilenga oil development and the $3.5 billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline. The campaigners wanted the court to order TotalEnergies to halt the east African projects, basing their case on a 2017 French law that requires companies to identify human rights and environmental risks…

Owners of 500 business enterprises are undergoing a three-week training programme with priority given to women-led start-ups. The training is funded by German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad), through Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)’s Employment and Skills for Development in Africa (E4D) Programme. The training started on Monday, February 20, 2023. Speaking at the training launch, at the SBIL premises in Kololo in Kampala, SBIL Chief Executive, Tony Otoa, said the training will be delivered with a key focus in three core areas namely; access to markets, access to…

By Crispin Kaheru Polls in the Federal Republic of Nigeria closed Saturday, February 25, 2023 at 2:30PM to elect a president and vice.  There were some delays in the commencement of the polls in both the rural and urban areas. Polling officials had to first familiarise themselves with the new polling technology before they could officially open the polling units. It is mainly for this reason that polls in some places did not start at 8:30am as designated by law. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines that are intended to verify voters as well as transmit polling information functioned fairly well across the…

The sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship is the cornerstone of the healthcare profession. This protected space is steeped in tradition – the Hippocratic oath, medical ethics, professional codes of conduct and legislation. But all of these are poised for disruption by digitisation, emerging technologies and “artificial” intelligence (AI). Innovation, robotics, digital technology and improved diagnostics, prevention and therapeutics can change healthcare for the better. They also raise ethical, legal and social challenges. Since the floodgates were opened on ChatGPT (Generative Pertaining Transformer) in 2022, bioethicists like us have been contemplating the role this new “chatbot” could play in healthcare and…

Election observers keep watch over polls throughout the world. Their job is to support efforts to improve electoral quality and to provide transparency. In African countries, both local citizen and international observers have been deployed regularly since the 1990s. During several recent elections across the continent, however, questions have arisen about the competence and impartiality of observation missions. This has led to concerns about the future of observation, both in Africa and elsewhere. In 2023, more than 20 African countries are scheduled to go to the polls. It will be a busy year for observers who’ll be present at the majority of these elections.…

Activists in Paris Wednesday called out two banks involved in the financing of a controversial fossil fuel project in East Africa, part of a coordinated protest across a dozen cities worldwide. About 30 young campaigners from the Stop Total collective demonstrated in front of the French offices of Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC) and Britain’s Standard Chartered. They demanded the banks pull back from the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), a 1,443-kilometre (900-mile) heated pipeline being jointly developed by France’s TotalEnergies and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), along with the state oil companies of Uganda and…

Africa’s agriculture sector accounts for about 35% of the continent’s gross domestic product, and provides the livelihood of more than 50% of the continent’s population. These shares are more than double those of the world average and much higher than those of any other emerging region. Dependence on agriculture has declined in other emerging regions. For example, in Southeast Asia, agriculture’s share of GDP dropped from 30-35% in 1970 to 10-15% in 2019. In Africa it has remained unchanged for decades, according to World Bank data. At the same time, Africa’s agriculture sector is the world’s least developed, with the lowest levels of labour and land productivity.…