Ghana set for close election in 'beacon of democracy'

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Ghana set for close election in 'beacon of democracy' | News24

Ghanaians voted in an election seen as a close fight between President Nana Akufo-Addo and his longtime rival John Mahama, in a country long viewed a beacon of stability in a troubled region.

Source: https://www.news24.com

The Faith Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut began in 1819 as a place for African Americans to worship on their own since they were previously only able to worship in the backs of churches and in church galleries in that city. A group of African Americans began worshipping in the conference room of the First Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut, which is now known as Center Church. This congregation moved to a building on State Street in 1820 and formed the first black Congregational Church in Connecticut and the third oldest in the nation. The church initially called itself the African American Religious Society of Hartford and vowed to create a place of worship where there would be no assigned seating and where anyone was welcome to worship. The congregation purchased property in 1826 where it built a stone-and-brick church on the corner of Talcott and Market Streets.

By the 1830s with the rise of the New England abolitionist movement, the church building became an anti-slavery meetinghouse. Popular lecturers spoke at the church in support of abolition, including Rev. Henry Highland Garnet and Arnold Buffman, former president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. James Pennington, an early church minister and abolitionist, was himself a fugitive slave from Maryland. Rev. Pennington and his congregation became supporters of the Amistad slave case in neighboring New Haven in 1839-1840 and fought for the release of the captured men, women, and children and their return to West Africa. The church also raised funds for the captives’ legal defense.

The church established a school in 1840, which served as the only place in Hartford where black children could obtain an education at that time. That same year, the congregation changed its name to First Hartford Colored Congregational Church. In 1860, another name change took place; the church became the Talcott Street Congregational Church and had several pastors until Rev. Robert F. Wheeler aided in the church’s stability and growing membership

Deprived of work and access to aid, thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa living in Morocco are struggling to make ends meet under Covid-19 restrictions.

“The misery is across the board,” said Ousmane Ba, head of the Collective of sub-Saharan Communities in Morocco.

The north African kingdom has long been a transit country for migrants and refugees seeking a better life in Europe, and it has also become a host country for many.

Abdoulaye Diop, head of the Federation of sub-Saharan associations in Morocco, organises food basket distribution within the Senegalese community.

“Today you eat rice, tomorrow pasta, the day after rice,” said Eouani Mambia Morelline, the 40-year-old Congolese head of a collective for migrant women in Morocco.

Obinwanne Okeke popularly referred to as ‘Invictus Obi’ made the plea in a Norfolk Magistrate Court Room 2 in the US district court for Eastern District of Virginia.

Okeke has thus formally pleaded guilty for charges relating to $11 million (N4.2 billion) computer-based fraud transacted between 2015 and 2019.

His company, Invictus Group, operates in three African countries, which include Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia, according to local news portal Legit

\tIn May 2017, The African Brand Congress awarded the Invictus Group of Companies Ltd the Africa’s Most Innovative Investment Company of the Year 2017 Award.

He was nominated for Africa’s most prestigious award for businessmen, The AABLA Awards, in the category of Young African Business Leader (West Africa).

Okeke is a regular contributor to the Forbes Africa Magazine where he shares his thoughts on entrepreneurship and investment in Africa; The Guardian further reported

On July 2, 2009 President Barack Obama appointed Gayleatha Beatrice Brown to be the United States ambassador to Burkina Faso, a nation in West Africa. This was her second ambassadorial appointment. Previously, Brown had been appointed by President George W. Bush to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Benin, a post she held from 2006 to 2009.

Brown was born in Matawan, West Virginia on June 20, 1947. Her family moved to New Jersey when she was a child and she graduated from Edison High School, in Edison, New Jersey in 1964. She received bachelor’s and master’s honor degrees from Howard University in Washington, D.C. in 1968 and 1970, respectively. Brown also did post-graduate work in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Before joining the United States Foreign Service in 1982, Brown was a Special Assistant at the Agency for International Development (USAID). She was later Assistant Administrator for Africa and a legislative assistant to the House of Representatives.

Brown had had extensive overseas experience before her ambassadorial appointment. Her first posts were, successively, as Development Officer at the U.S. Embassies in Paris, France and Abidjan, Côte dIvoire. She also served as Counselor for Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, and U.S. Consul General and U.S. Deputy Permanent Observer (concurrently) to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. She was Chief of the Economic and Commercial Sections at the U.S. Embassies in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. She was also desk officer at the U.S. State Department for Canada, Senegal, Guinea, and Mauritania.

Brown has represented the Department of State at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at Credit Arrangement negotiations, and she was a Desk Officer for the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM).

Brown’s honors and recognitions include the Lady of the Golden Horseshoe (West Virginia state

It has become a pattern every year for insurgents to step up attacks near Eid to sabotage the celebrations

\t“They arrived around 5:30pm and went on for more than four hours before the soldiers came to fight them,” said Bashir Manzo, a resident of Dapchi.

This attack is characteristic of the Boko Haram group, with which ISWAP split off in 2016, which regularly uses suicide bombers to target civilians.

Konduga is located in the Sambisa forest, a stronghold of Boko Haram from which suicide bombers have often launched their attacks in the past.

Earlier Monday, fighters from Boko Haram also attacked the village of Kautikeri in southern Borno State, beheading a resident and kidnapping a herder of 150 cattle, Ayuba Alamson, a Chibok community leader, told AFP.

“It has become a pattern every year for insurgents to step up attacks near Eid to sabotage the celebrations,” said the head of the anti-Jihadist militia in Borno, Babakura Kolo, saying this year “will be no different.

Lying on the Atlantic in the southern part of West Africa, Liberia is bordered by Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte dIvoire. It is comparable in size to Tennessee. Most of the country is a plateau covered by dense tropical forests, which thrive under an annual rainfall of about 160 in. a year.

Africas first republic, Liberia was founded in 1822 as a result of the efforts of the American Colonization Society to settle freed American slaves in West Africa. The society contended that the emigration of blacks to Africa was an answer to the problem of slavery and the incompatibility of the races. Over the course of forty years, about 12,000 slaves were voluntarily relocated. Originally called Monrovia, the colony became the Free and Independent Republic of Liberia in 1847.

The English-speaking Americo-Liberians, descendants of former American slaves, make up only 5% of the population, but have historically dominated the intellectual and ruling class. Liberias indigenous population is composed of 16 different ethnic groups.

The government of Africas first republic was modeled after that of the United States, and Joseph Jenkins Roberts of Virginia was elected the first president. Ironically, Liberias constitution denied indigenous Liberians equal to the lighter-skinned American immigrants and their descendants.

After 1920, considerable progress was made toward opening up the interior of the country, a process that facilitated by the 1951 establishment of a 43-mile (69-km) railroad to the Bomi Hills from Monrovia. In July 1971, while serving his sixth term as president, William V. S. Tubman died following surgery and was succeeded by his longtime associate, Vice President William R. Tolbert, Jr.

Tolbert was ousted in a military coup on April 12, 1980, by Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe, backed by the U.S. government. Does rule was characterized by corruption and brutality. A rebellion led by Charles Taylor, a former Doe aide, and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), started in Dec. 1989; the following

With Nigeria one of 36 countries at the risk of an acute food crisis in Africa, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) says it has scaled up its outreach to 1.2 million people monthly in the northeast region of the country in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

While the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening to double the number of hungry people in Nigeria, Mr Onyemaobi said the food security situation in Nigeria was quite alarming even before the pandemic.

Mr Onyemaobi said COVID-19 would double the number of food insecure people in Nigeria \"unless we all put heads together to extend food assistance to the most vulnerable people in our communities, towns and villages.\"

As a strategy to curtail the spread of the coronavirus disease, Mr Onyemaobi said WFP is distributing two months' of food and nutrition assistance in IDP camps and among vulnerable communities to ensure that people have sufficient food while they are on lockdown.

Meanwhile,Elisabeth Byers, the WFP spokesperson, according to a report by the United Nations (UN) website, said, in West Africa, \"An additional 20 million people could struggle to feed themselves due to the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 in the next six months, doubling the number of food-insecure to 43 million in this region.\"

Transair, an ambitious company founded 10 years ago, has no passengers because of the pandemic - but it still has to fly its planes.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates the crisis will inflict a hit of $314 billion on airlines' turnover this year, equivalent to a fall of 55% over 2019.

Such talk is grim news for Senegal's three airlines, the biggest of which is the national flag carrier Air Senegal, founded in 2016, which specialises in scheduled flights between West Africa and Europe.

\"Before (the pandemic), we were expanding, we were even thinking about starting inter-continental flights in a few years,\" Transair's boss and founder, Alioune Fall, told AFP.

Of this, 45 billion francs is likely to go to Air Senegal, while Transair, as a private company, is likely to be offered low-interest loans and a delay in value-added tax (VAT) payments.

\tGhana’s case load as of this morning stood at 11,118 cases with the disclosure of 262 new cases.

\tGhana reached 10,000 mark in terms of confirmed cases on Tuesday (June 9); the case load reached 10,201 with deaths still at 48, 3,755 recoveries and 6,398 active cases.

“The app will basically work well with the rapid test kit because once classified as high risk you need to test the person,” he said, stressing the need for mass testing given that Ghana had entered community transmission stage of virus spread.

\tGovernment has confirmed that it was preparing to evacuate some Ghanaians stranded overseas due to the COVID-19 disruption.

\tThe Managing Director of a major private health care facility in the capital Accra reported testing positive for the virus.

Air ambulance services operating on the African continent are seeing an uptick in medevacs linked to Covid-19 and are adjusting to a number of difficulties in transporting infected patients, both within Africa and outside the continent.

\"In the air ambulance industry, Covid-19 has had a huge impact,\" says Fraser Lamond of Air Rescue Africa, a Johannesburg-based company operating two Hawker aircraft.

Typical clients for air ambulance services in Africa include workers for non-governmental organisations, corporations, tourists and governments, although this has changed with permission to move infectious patients becoming more difficult to obtain.

Some African governments have reportedly employed air ambulances to provide medevacs for officials suffering from Covid-19.

A typical Covid-19 medical evacuation by aircraft ranges from between $60,000 to $100,000 for taking a patient from west Africa to South Africa or Europe, depending on the aircraft employed, according to industry estimates.

Davidson Nicol , in full Davidson Sylvester Hector Willoughby Nicol, also called Abioseh Nicol (born Sept. 14, 1924, Freetown, Sierra Leone—died Sept. 20, 1994, Cambridge, Eng.), Sierra Leonean diplomat, physician, medical researcher, and writer whose short stories and poems are among the best to have come out of West Africa.

Nicol was educated in medicine and natural sciences in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and England, and he subsequently served in various medical posts in those countries. He became known for his research into the structure of insulin, and he lectured and wrote widely on medical topics. He was principal of Fourah Bay College, Freetown (1960–68), vice chancellor of the University of Sierra Leone (1966–68), and his country’s ambassador to the United Nations (1969–71). Nicol was president of the UN Security Council in 1970, and from 1972 to 1982 he served as executive director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). He was president of the World Federation of UN Associations from 1983 to 1987.

Nicol’s short stories were published in Two African Tales (1965) and The Truly Married Woman, and Other Stories (1965), under the name Abioseh Nicol. They centre upon life in the government service and upon the interaction of Africans with colonial administrators in preindependent Sierra Leone. His short stories and poems appeared in anthologies and journals. He also wrote Africa, A Subjective View (1964) and edited several other nonfiction works.

Nicol from 1957 was a fellow of his college at the University of Cambridge, the first African to be so named at either Cambridge or Oxford.

Nouakchott, meaning “place of the winds” in the Hassaniya language, became the capital of Mauritania in 1960. In 2006 it had an estimated population of 708,000 people. It is located on the Atlantic Ocean but is on the edge of the Sahara Desert area of North and West Africa. Scarce rainfall and desert conditions generate short but warm winters and long hot summers. Although Nouakchott is the largest city in the country there are no high rise buildings. Nonetheless the city is the economic and administrative center of Mauritania.

The history of the city of Nouakchott began with its founding in 1659 by indigenous people from the surrounding region. From 1659 to 1958 Nouakchott was a small fishing village. As late as 1950 it had only about 200 people. As the French colony of Mauritania was moving toward its independence, beginning with autonomy in 1958 and ending in full independence in 1960, Nouakchott was selected as the capital because of its climate and its coastal location.

French colonial officials planned for a population of around 50,000 but budget restrictions in France and the poverty of the new nation of Mauritania prevented the city from reaching that population until the late 1960s. Beginning in 1969, however, the Sahel drought forced subsistence farmers and nomadic peoples from across Mauritania into the city. The drought continued through all of the 1970s and migrants from throughout the nation increased the city’s population to around 150,000 people in 1980. Today, the population of Nouakchott comprises nearly 20% of Mauritania’s total population of 3.8 million people.

A number of languages are spoken in Nouakchott including Arabic, French, Hassaniya, and Pulaar. The major religions are Christianity with Catholics as the most numerous of that faith, and Muslims, most of whom are Sunni. Ethnically the city includes Arabs, Berbers, and Sub-Saharan Africans. There is also a small population of Europeans and Asians. The city is divided into numerous districts reflecting the various

[UN News] It will take a variety of different actors to confront and deal with the \"daunting challenges\" in the Sahel region, the head of UN peacekeeping told the Security Council on Monday.

\tA major religious group is advocating a phased lifting of remaining restrictions in the country.

\tMain opposition NDC continued their collision with the elections body over the compilation of a new voters register ahead of December 2020 polls.

\tGhana’s case count passed 6,000 mark reaching 6,096 on Tuesday according to tallies released by the Ghana Health Service.

\tNo new figures were released on Monday but the government through the Information Ministry will release new tallies at a press conference scheduled for later today.

In recent years, a number of African countries have opted to select players born outside the national territory.

Some of these players represented France in youth or under-age teams but elected to play for the country of their parents at senior international level.

Of the 368 players registered in the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations tournament, 93 were born outside the country they were representing.

In total, 38 players for these five countries were born in Europe, the majority in France (25).

At the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations, of the 552 players registered in the tournament, 129 were born outside the country they were representing.

In response to COVID-19 school closures and adherence to social distancing, UNESCO and many governments and agencies have recommended the use of distance learning, open educational applications and online learning to reduce disruption to education.

Despite the best efforts of government, schools and parents there will be learning losses for almost everybody and worsened educational outcomes for the poor.

We applied the learning curve scenario methodology developed by the World Bank to the South African Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study data to illustrate the patterns of expected learning losses over the next few months due to school closures and disruptions.

While we don't know the exact value of the learning losses, these graphs illustrate that learning loss patterns will be different for learners in different school types.

The sad and uncomfortable truth is that for South Africa, with low and unequal achievement scores, the longer social distancing is in place the bigger the learning losses for learners, especially the most disadvantaged, thereby deepening inequalities.

WASHINGTON, May 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Idris Elba on Friday called for urgent action and creative solutions to prevent a looming hunger crisis in poor countries, where food production and transport have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

With 60% of employment in Africa in agriculture, \"that's an awful lot of people who are going to suffer and not eat because of the crisis and ongoing effects,\" Elba said.

Coronavirus is set to almost double global hunger by the end of the year, putting an additional 130 million people at risk because of cut-off trade flows and loss of income, according to the World Food Programme.

IFAD has pledged $40 million to the new U.N. fund and is providing cash transfers to farmers, distributing seeds and fertilizers and in some places negotiating with authorities to get food to market.

\"The combined effects of climate change, exacerbated by the locust outbreak, exacerbated by COVID means there's been a complete disruption in all food supply chains,\" said Sara Mbago-Bhunu, director of IFAD's East and Southern Africa Division.