SAMBUT, Kenya — William Ruto spent his childhood on a plot of family land down an unpaved, narrow road in a quiet village in the Rift Valley, where he tended cows and helped till the field for maize and cabbage. But these days, Mr. Ruto, vice president of Kenya for close to a decade, wakes…
Interesting things are happening in Kenya’s democracy. The August 9 election is not one of them.
Healthy life expectancy among Africans living in mainly high and upper middle-income countries on the continent, has increased by almost 10 years, the UN health agency, WHO, said on Thursday.
A powerful new sculpture unveiled at UN Headquarters on Wednesday honours the memory and mission of two human rights experts who were murdered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) five years ago.
Lawmakers in Germany voted overwhelmingly Friday to approve Finland’s and Sweden’s membership in NATO, with Poland’s lower house moving the ratification forward as well. NATO allies meeting in Madrid last week signed the accession protocols for the two countries to join the alliance. The move must now be ratified by the governments of all member states.…
Accra, Ghana — It was all fun and euphoria at the Kempinski Hotel in Accra, where fans of the National Football League, the NFL, assembled to meet with football athletes, stars and legends of the game. This is the first time the NFL has held an event in Africa as part of its goal to see…
A summit of the organization that was born out of the embers of the British Empire is being held for the first time in the African country, but discussion of the host’s alleged abuses is conspicuously missing. KIGALI, Rwanda — Presidents, princes and prime ministers from across the world gathered on Friday in Kigali, the…
Johannesburg, South Africa —
South Africa on Saturday hailed a WTO agreement to allow developing countries to start producing their own COVID vaccines following a near two-year battle.
“We secured an agreement. It was a strongly fought agreement,” said Minister of Trade Ebrahim Patel, who along with India and NGOs had been calling for an intellectual property rights waiver on COVID-related treatments.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) announced a relaxation of intellectual property restrictions on vaccines Wednesday in a move aimed at a providing more equitable access to shots but which many observers criticized for being limited in time and scope.
After months of wrangling, and talks going down to the wire this week to win over some major players in pharmaceutical manufacturing to a compromise, the United States and China finally clinched the deal by agreeing on which countries would benefit from the waiver.
Both South Africa and India had been vocal in their demands for such a move which they said was needed to stop “vaccine apartheid.”
According to the WTO, 60% of the world’s population has received two doses of the COVID vaccine but there are glaring examples of inequity with only 17% having been inoculated in Libya, with the figure at 8% in Nigeria and less than 5% in Cameroon.
In a statement, the South African government saluted a waiver designed to provide local vaccine manufacturers with the right to produce either vaccines or ingredients or elements that are under patents, without the authority of the patent holder, hailing this as a notable step forward — even if limited to five years.
Pretoria added that “to scale up the production on the continent, further partnerships will be needed including access to know-how and technologies.”
The accord for the time being excludes, however, tests and costly therapeutic treatments against COVID on which the WTO is to pronounce in the coming six months.
Commercialization in Africa will be a challenge, however.
Durban-based South African pharma giant Aspen, which clinched a deal last November with U.S.-based Johnson & Johnson to manufacture a “made in Africa for Africa” Aspen-branded COVID vaccine Aspenovax, said last month it could pull the plug owing to lack of orders.
“Our focus now is to ensure we address demand by persuading global procurers for vaccines to source from African producers,” said Patel.
South Africa has three sites under the aegis of Aspen in Durban, Afrigen in Cape Town and Biovac, also in Cape Town, which makes the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Afrigen’s biotech consortium makes the messenger RNA shot based on the Moderna formula, the first to be made based on a broadly used vaccine that does not require the developer’s assistance and approval.
ACCRA, Ghana — West African heads of state put off further punishing the leaders of Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso at a regional summit Saturday, as coup leaders in all three countries continue to insist that it will take years before new elections can be held.
The 15-nation regional bloc known as ECOWAS will convene again on July 3 before determining if further sanctions will be implemented in the three suspended members states, ECOWAS Commission President Jean-Claude Kassi Brou said.
ECOWAS already imposed strong economic sanctions against Mali back in January — shutting down most commerce, along with land and air borders with other countries in the bloc. Those measures have crippled Mali’s economy, prompting concern about the humanitarian consequences on Malians.
The sanctions have not yet brought about a political breakthrough either: In the months since, Col. Assimi Goita has only further isolated the country internationally, pulling out of a regional security force and also shutting down two leading French media broadcasters.
Goita’s government also still insists that no vote can be held until 2024, which would extend their time to power to nearly four years despite originally agreeing to an 18-month transition back to democracy.
The juntas in Guinea and Burkina Faso also have proposed three-year transitions, which have been rejected by ECOWAS as too long a wait for new elections.
The wave of military coups began in August 2020, when Goita and other soldiers overthrew Mali’s democratically elected president. Nine months later, he carried out a second coup when he dismissed the country’s civilian transitional leader and became president himself.
Mutinous soldiers deposed Guinea’s president in September 2021, and Burkina Faso’s leader was ousted in yet another coup in the region back in January.
The political upheaval came at a time when many observers were starting to think that military power grabs were a thing of the past in West Africa: Mali had gone eight years without one, while Guinea had made it 13 years.
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Associated Press writers Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal, Baba Ahmed in Bamako, Mali; and Boubacar Diallo in Conakry, Guinea contributed.
The CFA franc zone, which encompasses 14 countries in francophone West and Central Africa bonded by French colonial heritage and common currency, is falling behind most developing countries in terms of per capita growth, private sector competitiveness, governance, human development, and poverty reduction. Such challenges have been exacerbated by recent increased external shocks such as…