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ADF STAFF  |  photos by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS When it comes to bragging rights, Nigeria and Ghana are rivals in many things. These days, it’s football and a festive rice dish. The latest edition of the intense rivalry came at the end of March 2022, when Ghana’s national football team defeated Nigeria to advance to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Any rivalry between the two countries might seem unlikely. In terms of population, Nigeria is the continent’s largest country, with 206 million residents. Ghana is the continent’s 13th-largest country, with 31 million residents. Their rivalry dates to 1957, when…

ADF STAFF Google has partnered with Mali’s traditional leaders to digitize tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts from the city of Timbuktu. Political unrest in the nation’s north has endangered the manuscripts. In 2013, extremists burned two libraries in Timbuktu. Many manuscripts were reported destroyed, along with many other monuments of Islamic culture. However, librarians had secretly moved most of the manuscripts ahead of the attacks. Timbuktu was founded as a commercial center in West Africa 900 years ago. Dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries, the ancient manuscripts cover many elements of knowledge including mathematics, medicine, science and…

ADF STAFF Tanzanian filmmakers have released the country’s first film to be streamed on Netflix. “Binti” is a story about the lives and struggles of four women surviving extreme hardship in Dar es Salaam. The film is about the painful circumstances that some women find themselves in as they pursue a “perfect” life. “We have dealt with so many obstacles, including post production in different countries during a pandemic, just to be seen, and this is only the beginning,” Angela Ruhinda, who co-founded the film’s production company with her sister, Alinda, told OkayAfrica. Godliver Gordian, one of the film’s actors,…

DEFENCEWEB  |  photos by EUROPEAN UNION Naval leaders from the European Union and Nigeria met to pledge a strong partnership to combat threats at sea.  Held on April 7, 2022, the first-ever Joint Event on Strengthening Nigeria-EU Cooperation on Maritime Security took place at the Nigerian Navy’s Western Naval Command in Lagos. It included port calls from the Italian Navy frigate ITN Luigi Rizzo and the Spanish Navy offshore patrol vessel ESPS Serviola. The Nigerian Navy, the EU Delegation to Nigeria and EU Member States operating under the EU Coordinated Maritime Presences initiative organized the high-level event. It included two…

U.N. ASSISTANCE MISSION IN SOMALIA  |  Photos by EUCAP SOMALIA Somalia’s maritime capabilities received a boost on March 30, 2022, with the inauguration of a state-of-the-art facility for the Somali Police Force (SPF) in the capital, Mogadishu. The $3 million project was funded by the European Union and implemented by the U.N. Office for Project Services (UNOPS) and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The facility will provide a base from which the SPF can operate around Mogadishu Port and along the Somali coastline. The facility, under construction since 2018, is made up of a furnished headquarters block…

DEFENCEWEB Cabo Verdean and U.S. forces made a major drug bust after intercepting a suspicious vessel during a joint maritime law enforcement operation.  On April 1, 2022, Cabo Verdean authorities and U.S. Sailors aboard the Expeditionary Sea Base USS Hershel “Woody” Williams intercepted a vessel smuggling 6,000 kilograms of suspected cocaine. The illicit cargo has an estimated street value of more than $350 million. Cabo Verdean law enforcement arrested seven people during the operation, which was supported by Interpol. The Brazilian-flagged fishing vessel was stopped as the African Maritime Law Enforcement Partnership conducted operations in international waters near the west…

DEFENCEWEB The Tanzania People’s Defence Force (TPDF) is turning heads with the use of the Israeli Gilboa DBR Snake double-barreled assault rifle. The TPDF is the first military known to use such a weapon, according to a report by Janes, an intelligence company.  The Gilboa DBR Snake combines two 5.56 millimeter AR-15-type rifles into a single weapon, fed by two standard magazines. Both barrels fire when the single trigger is pulled. The idea behind the weapon’s construction is to provide a rapid burst of fire to increase hit probability and faster target incapacitation with a single trigger pull. The weapons…

ADF STAFF When the extremist group Ansar al-Sunna began spreading terror in the Cabo Delgado province of northern Mozambique in 2017, its fighters brandished machetes. Today, the insurgents carry assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Analysts say a major reason for this is extremists have captured equipment from the Mozambican military. Militant groups throughout the continent have armed themselves this way. “Contingent-owned equipment (COE) loss has become a critical vulnerability for national armies and peace operations in Africa,” arms expert Eric G. Berman recently wrote for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. “Non-state armed groups have regularly targeted and overrun peacekeepers…

Kenya has released the first group of mountain bongos into a sanctuary to save the rare forest antelopes from extinction in the wild. The two males and three females were released near Mount Kenya. The country is the last place where the species is found in its native habitat. Fewer than 100 are believed to exist. “Every subsequent year, an additional 10 mountain bongos will be translocated into the sanctuary in groups of five every six months,” Tourism Minister Najib Balala told the BBC. The animals taken to the sanctuary are selected from breeding herds and allowed to roam and…

THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION As the sun slid toward noon, Adam Fuseina’s daughter jumped off a bicycle at their home in Nafaring village in northern Ghana. She called out to her mother to say that she was back from shopping with a basket full of cooking oil, flour and greens. “This will keep us going for a week,” said the 43-year-old mother of five, standing amid the village’s mud-walled shelters with fraying thatched roofs. Things were different a year earlier, when Fuseina’s family could sometimes manage only one meal a day. Ghana’s worsening floods and droughts have made growing fruit and…