ADF

REUTERS Zakes Hadebe’s minibus taxi has nearly half a million kilometers on it, a broken speedometer and a fuel gauge he struggles to keep just above empty. Yet by 8 a.m. one morning, Hadebe and his rattling Toyota already had overcome rain, traffic and an ever-rising petrol price to ferry nearly 40 commuters from South Africa’s Soweto township to nearby Johannesburg. South Africa’s minibus taxi industry, scorned for reckless driving and dogged by a reputation for violence, moves 15 million people every day, most of them lower-income workers. More like buses than the taxis of New York or London, the rumbling…

ADF STAFF Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana’s founding president and a leader who ascended to the heights of power and experienced the depths of failure. Today, despite his flaws, he is remembered as a hero in his home country and across the continent. Born in 1909 in the British colony Gold Coast, Nkrumah went to one of his country’s best schools before traveling to the United States in 1935. He graduated from Lincoln University, America’s oldest black college, in Pennsylvania in 1939. He embraced America’s black culture, making friends with its intellectuals. He was elected president of the African Students Organization…

U.S. Africa Command Staff In many ways, the continent of Africa is more peaceful today than it has been in decades. A 2012 analysis published in the journal African Affairs showed that conflicts on the continent have been decreasing in number, size and brutality since the early 1990s. But patches of instability remain. The fallout from the Arab Spring has resulted in loose weapons and volatile political environments across North Africa and the Sahel. The terrorist group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, though weakened after the international intervention in Mali, still lurks in ungoverned areas and moves across porous borders.…

Ghanaian President John Dramani Mahama addressed the 68th United Nations General Assembly on September 26, 2013, in New York City days after terrorists attacked Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. This is an edited version of his remarks. Before I left Ghana to attend this assembly, I learned of the terrorist attack that took place in Nairobi, Kenya. I was shocked and deeply saddened to hear of the many lives that were lost to those senseless and cowardly acts of violence. As the death toll increased, so too did my grief, knowing that each additional number symbolized one more human…

IRIN “Plant doctor” Daniel Lyazi cuts apart a slime-covered cabbage at a farmers’ market in Mukono, central Uganda, where the devastating cassava brown streak disease first was identified in 2004. “There’s a small caterpillar which is eating the cabbage, and according to me, it’s a diamond-back moth,” he tells farmers who crowd around his table. Lyazi advises the cabbage grower to switch pesticides and plant some onions as an additional repellent to moths, and he fills out a form with this prescription before turning to the next “patient,” an undersize cassava tuber. Free “plant clinics” like this one were piloted…

VOICE OF AMERICA Kenyan wildlife officials have begun inserting microchips into rhinos in a bid to combat poachers, who kill the animals for their horns. Officials said the chips and accompanying scanners will let them track the animals and help authorities link recovered or confiscated horns to poaching cases.  The Kenyan Wildlife Service received the equipment from the World Wildlife Fund, whose Kenya spokesman Robert Magori said each rhino will have one chip implanted in its body and a second chip embedded in its horn.  “When a rhino is killed and the horn is hacked off and taken away, if…

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE Rwanda is trying to reinvent itself as a regional high-tech hub by rolling out free citywide, and eventually nationwide, wireless connectivity. “I came to use the Internet. Sometimes I download video and books,” said South Korean development worker Lee Il-mo, 31, a resident of Kigali for the past two years. “Before, I went to restaurants or coffee bars and I had to buy a drink, but here it’s a free area,” he said, sitting in Kigali City Tower — a zone slated as the city’s new tech hub and one of the first steps of the “Smart Kigali”…

Bringing Peace to Africa’s ‘Arc of Instability’ Will Require Action in the Security Sector and the Halls of Government ADF STAFF The 7,000-kilometer cross-continental journey that begins in the Horn of Africa and stretches across the Sahel into West Africa will pass through numerous conflict areas. The band of territory is rife with poverty, illicit trafficking, war, terrorism and ethnic unrest. The path shares common characteristics that have led it to be known by some as the “arc of instability.” In Somalia, al-Shabaab militants capitalized on years of lawlessness to dole out murder at home and beyond. Rebel groups hold…

Disease Outbreaks Can Quickly Overwhelm Resources, So Strengthening Military and Civilian Ties is Key ADF STAFF A highly contagious disease struck Nigeria in February 2006. By April of that year, 325,000 had been infected, and 223,000 had died. The virus spread to Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ghana and Niger as well. It had the power to cause widespread death and bring an entire industry to its knees. The disease, which began on a farm in Jaji, Nigeria, was a virulent strain of bird flu known as H5N1. Its casualties were chickens. Birds not killed by the infection were slaughtered to prevent…

Chad’s intervention in northern Mali offers lessons in resolve and sacrifice ADF STAFF A column of about 100 Chadian light vehicles, mostly Toyota Land Cruisers, left Chad’s capital, N’Djamena on January 20, 2013. The convoy curled around the Lake Chad basin before reaching the border with Niger. Days earlier, nearly 200 armored vehicles, including 90 Eland armored cars and 17 BMP tanks, were airlifted to Niger’s capital, Niamey. At the Niger border-crossing, Brig. Gen. Abdraman Youssouf Mery, commander of Chad’s elite groupement speciale anti-terroriste (SATG), halted the convoy and gathered his officers around him. “We are going outside of our borders now,”…