ADF

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Morocco wants to rejoin the African Union, 32 years after quitting the bloc in protest of its decision to accept Western Sahara as a member, King Mohammed VI said in July 2016. “For a long time our friends have been asking us to return to them, so that Morocco can take up its natural place within its institutional family. The moment has now come,” the monarch said in a message to an AU summit in Kigali, Rwanda, the Moroccan Press Agency reported. Morocco quit the OAU in protest in 1984 when the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic was admitted…

MEDIA CLUB SOUTH AFRICA The story of Abdel Kader Haidara, a book collector and librarian from Timbuktu, Mali, reads more like a spy novel than an academic work. When extremists allied to al-Qaida occupied his city in April 2012, he began to fear for the content of libraries and depositories that housed thousands of ancient Arabic manuscripts. So he set up a meeting with his colleagues in the Timbuktu Library Association. “We need to take out the manuscripts from the big buildings and disperse them around the city to family houses,” he told them, as he recalled later in an…

VOICE OF AMERICA When Africans go on Twitter, they are increasingly talking politics. A study by Portland Communications, a London-based business, shows that nearly 10 percent of the most-popular African hashtags in 2015 were related to political issues and politicians. In the U.S. and Britain, only 2 percent of those conversations were about politics, the study shows. The top political hashtag in Africa was #Nigeriadecides during Nigeria’s presidential election in 2015. Another popular conversation was the strife in Burundi. “In the U.K., we were using Twitter a lot and we wanted to know how Africa was using it,” said Mae…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE The government of Cameroon is partnering with French energy giant EDF and the World Bank to fund a $1.2 billion hydroelectric plant, slated to cover up to one-third of the country’s electricity needs. Natchigal hydropower company has a 35-year lease to run the facility in the town of the same name, 65 kilometers from the capital, Yaoundé, CRTV radio of Cameroon reported. Construction on the 420-megawatt plant was scheduled to begin in October 2016. The plant is expected to begin producing power in 2021. EDF has a 40 percent stake in the venture, with the World Bank’s International…

REUTERS The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) has helped detect a type of star known as a white dwarf pulsar, the first discovery of its kind. The news has astronomers eager to use the largest optical telescope in the Southern Hemisphere to unlock the galaxy’s secrets. Scientists believe neutron stars, objects about the size of the sun that shrink at the end of their lives, eventually produce black holes. These incredibly dense objects have been known for decades to produce pulsars, which emit regular radio waves and other electromagnetic radiation at rates up to 1,000 pulses per second. On a…

MEDIA CLUB SOUTH AFRICA A popular variety of handmade commercial paper has messy beginnings. John Matano’s Nampath Paper is one of 17 Kenyan companies that processes elephant dung to make high-quality paper. Matano’s paper is, according to the BBC, as good as paper made from traditional sources. Elephants digest only about 45 percent of their highly fibrous herbivorous diet. Undigested fiber passes straight through them, creating dung that can be easily processed into paper. Or as Matano explained, “An average elephant eats 250 kilograms of food each day. Out of that amount, about 50 kilograms of dung is produced, and…

He acted from his heart ADF STAFF In 1994, after the assassination of the president of Rwanda, soldiers of the presidential guard tortured and killed Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, her husband and 10 Belgian peacekeepers. Hutu extremists took power and began the infamous Rwandan genocide, killing hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi minority and some politically moderate Hutus. That same morning, United Nations peacekeeper Mbaye Diagne got word of the murders. The Senegalese captain went to investigate and found the prime minister’s five children hiding. When reinforcements did not arrive, Mbaye hid the children under blankets in his vehicle…

CLUES This water body’s salt content is 34.8 percent. That’s 10 times higher than the oceans and 5 to 10 percent higher than the Dead Sea. It is one of the hottest places on earth, with temperatures sometimes climbing above 50 degrees Celsius during the day. It is about 155 meters below sea level, making it the lowest place on the African continent. The name of this place translates to “the honey lake.” ANSWER: Lake Assal, Djibouti

It’s natural for security professionals to think of their duties in a traditional sense. They’re trained to defend borders, protect the nation, and repel internal and external threats. But beginning in the early 1990s, a new term began to gain currency: human security. In 1994, the United Nations codified this concept, saying security needs to include protection from disease, hunger, crime, social conflict, unemployment, political repression and environmental hazards. Security “has been related more to nation-states than to people,” the U.N. wrote in its annual human development report. “Forgotten were the legitimate concerns of ordinary people.” This is an important…

When I took over as the eighth elected president of the African Development Bank on September 1, 2015, I was elated at the greater possibilities that lie ahead for Africa and the role that the bank can play.  To further accelerate the development of Africa, the bank has raised the bar on its level of ambition. We call them the High-Fives for Africa: Light up and power Africa; Feed Africa; Industrialize Africa; Integrate Africa; and Improve the quality of life for Africans. LIGHT UP AND POWER AFRICA: Over 645 million Africans do not have access to electricity — and 700…