by tyler | Jun 27, 2023 | africa, CNN
Nigerian authorities and Shell’s local subsidiary were on Monday investigating the cause of an oil spill on the Trans Niger pipeline that lasted several days.
The spill from the 180,000-barrel-a-day, which happened at Eleme in Rivers State in south Nigeria, was detected on June 11. Four days later it was confirmed by Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited in a statement.
Environmental rights groups said the spill lasted a week before it was contained.
Representatives from Shell, the Nigerian Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, and local communities were at the site on Monday to gather information, analyze data, examine physical evidence, and assess the causes of the leak, said Youths and Environmental Advocacy Centre, which monitors spills in the Niger Delta.
A Shell spokesperson confirmed Monday’s visit to the site.
The investigation will determine the volume of oil spilled.
Shell has, over the years, faced several legal battles focused on oil spills in the Niger Delta, a region blighted by pollution, conflict and corruption related to the oil and gas industry.
The oil major blames most of the spills on pipeline vandalism and illegal tapping of crude.
Thandile Chinyavanhu, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Africa, said the latest spill compounded Shell’s record in one of Africa’s leading oil producing nations.
“Shell must be held accountable and financially responsible for this spill and for its neocolonial role in causing climate loss and damage,” Chinyavanhu said.
She added, “as we approach global climate talks, COP28, world leaders must be prepared to make polluters pay.”
by tyler | Jun 26, 2023 | africa, CNN
Sierra Leone’s President Maada Bio has taken an early lead in the country’s presidential election, provisional results showed.
The Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone (ECSL) said it had so far tallied around 60% of the total vote and expects to declare a winner in the next two days.
The election is considered a two-horse race between President Bio, 59, of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and 72-year-old former cabinet minister Samura Kamara, who leads the opposition All People’s Congress (APC) party.
Bio has so far polled more than a million votes and currently leads Kamara with over 200,000 votes, according to ECSL.
Earlier, Bio’s SLPP party said it was “greatly anticipating a landslide victory” following an internal review of its performance in the elections.
To be declared winner, a presidential candidate must secure 55% of the total votes. If this is not achieved in the first round of voting, a run-off election will be held between the two candidates with the highest votes.
The electoral commission described the weekend poll as relatively peaceful but acknowledged pockets of violence and delays in polling in some areas.
On Sunday, Kamara’s APC party accused the country’s security forces of laying siege to its head office in the capital Freetown, and firing live rounds into the property while it held a press conference after the polls.
In a series of tweets, Kamara said his party’s headquarters had been surrounded by government forces and live bullets had been fired at the door of his private office.
“This is an assassination attempt,” he added.
Another opposition leader, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, who is seeking reelection as the mayor of Freetown, posted photos from inside the surrounded building and wrote: “I am in the APC Party office and we are under fire. It is tear gas and what sounds like live rounds. There are about 20 of us on the ground in one office. The shots are still being fired. We need help please!”
The police accused the APC party of carrying out a procession and claiming victory in the polls ahead of an official declaration by the electoral commission, in a statement made available to CNN.
It added that officers were forced to fire teargas canisters when the “situation became unbearable,” but did not include details about whether shots were fired at the APC’s head office.
The statement accused APC party members of “harassing passers-by”, including those thought to be members of the ruling SLPP party and “announcing to the public that they had won the just concluded elections.”
Voting was carried out Saturday under heavy security presence and armored tanks.
Ahead of the polls, police fired rubber bullets and teargas at supporters of the APC, during a demonstration that called for the resignation of Chief electoral Commissioner, Mohamed Konneh, following allegations of electoral fraud.
by tyler | Jun 19, 2023 | africa, CNN
Twenty people accused of helping an ISIS-linked rebel group suspected of killing dozens, mostly students at a school in western Uganda, have been arrested, Ugandan police told CNN.
Around 42 people, including 37 students were killed on Friday when members of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group attacked the Lhubirira Secondary School in Mpondwe, hacking some of their victims to death with machetes and setting off fire at the dormitories.
Six other people were abducted, authorities said.
A spokesperson for the Uganda Police Force, Fred Enanga, told CNN on Monday that 20 suspected ADF collaborators had been arrested, but no actual members of the militia group.
The arrests follow authorities’ earlier disclosure that the ADF may have spent days planning the attack with the help of local residents in town.
The Lhubirira school is located in the town of Kasese, which sits along the country’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, with students aged between 13 and 18.
The youngest victim in the Friday attack was just 12 years old, police said.
Grieving families have begun retrieving the bodies of their loved ones from a local morgue for burial, state broadcaster, UBC Television reported Monday.
Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni described the attack as “criminal, desperate, terrorist and futile” in a statement Sunday. He also said he was deploying more troops to the western part of the country and across Uganda’s border with the Congo to pursue the assailants.
“Especially now that the Congo Government allowed us to operate on the Congo side also, we have no excuse in not hunting down the ADF terrorists into extinction,” Museveni said.
Uganda’s security forces have battled to rein in the ADF, which continues to mastermind deadly attacks both in the country and in the Congo, from the mountainous border between both nations.
At least 12 worshipers were killed and around 50 injured when a bomb was detonated by the ADF at a church service in the Congo’s North Kivu province in January.
The ISIS-linked ADF was designated as a terrorist organization by the United States in 2021 and was sanctioned by the United Nations in 2014.
by tyler | Jun 19, 2023 | africa, CNN
The reddish soil of the Shakahola forest is still giving up its terrible secrets. Two hours drive from Kenya’s coastal tourist town of Malindi, forensic teams turn off the tarred road into a thicket of thorn bush, entering a crime scene that came to light in mid-March.
CNN has traveled here as investigators uncover what could become one of the worst mass suicides in recent memory.
Detectives say that the cult community was split into eight separate settlements with biblical names such as Galilee and Bethlehem. In site after site, shallow graves disturb the dirt. Many of the graves were unmarked.
Already, more than 300 sets of bodies have been recovered. But Kenyan interior ministry officials say that scores of mass graves remain.
The cult was preparing for the end of the world under the instruction of their its powerful pastor, say investigators.
Followers believed that starvation was their ticket to their salvation
The revelation of mass graves has dominated headlines and shaken the collective psyche in a country where faith and religion are central.
Many find it difficult to comprehend the dark path that Pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie allegedly took his followers along.
But the trajectory it is all too familiar for cult specialists and psychologists. They contend that the “Shakahola Massacre,” as it has been dubbed, bears all the hallmarks of destructive cults past and present.
“The pastor called me. He called me and said, ‘my daughter, you are being left behind. When the ark is closed, you will be too late,’” says Agnes, as her children play on a reed mat in her yard in Malindi.
Like many former cult members, she was unwilling to share her full name.
Agnes, now 26, joined Mackenzie’s church when she was still in high school along with other members of her family.
In Kenya, there is an old joke that if you lose your job, start a church or a charity. And sometime in the early 2000s, Mackenzie abandoned his job as a taxi driver and launched the Good News International Ministry.
Mackenzie became known for his fiery sermons. He drew a significant following, says an assistant pastor who worked with him for years until they had a falling out.
He did not wish to be named as he said he is a witness in the investigation.
“In the beginning, the church was good, there were no issues. The sermons were normal, but from 2010 his ‘end time’ messages began. It happened step by step,” he says.
The assistant pastor says Mackenzie told his followers to pull their children out of school, discard their national IDs, avoid hospitals, and start preparing for the end of the world. Investigators say they have corroborated those details.
He drew in flight attendants and social workers; paramilitary police and professionals from all across Kenya.
At a recent hearing Mackenzie denied all knowledge of the horrors that witnesses, inspectors, and survivors believe happened in the Shakahola forest.
“I can tell nothing about that. Because I have been in custody for two months. So, I don’t know what is going outside there. Have you been there?” he asked CNN.
When asked about the accusations that followers of his group had starved their children following his instructions, Mackenzie said he had “never seen anybody starving.”
The pastor and his closest followers have been in custody since the mass graves were discovered, although they are yet to be charged as prosecutors continue to ask the court to extend the custody period to allow further investigation.
To understand the Shakahola cult, the focus must be on Mackenzie, says Rick Ross, a leading American cult expert who has studied destructive cults for decades.
“It’s not the group; it’s the leader. The more power they have, the more it becomes intoxicating,” he says.
Ross says that from Charles Manson and David Koresh to Ugandan cult leader Joseph Kibwetere, the desire is to control.
“My feeling is Mackenzie was the same. He was a man that no matter how much control and power he had over his followers, it was never enough,” says Ross.
Mackenzie exerted that control using his pulpit – and his charismatic oratory both in his church in Malindi and online.
“Look what will befall all nations of this world. Anger, frustration, and many things, and many disasters will make human beings cry without help. That is what will cover the world,” he prophesied to his followers in early 2020 in a nearly three-hours harangue.
Mackenzie’s prophecies had an impact. He persuaded Agnes and many like her to leave school.
Agnes says she shaved her head and entered a church-arranged marriage.
“Some of his preaching turned into reality. He said that diseases would come and then the Coronavirus came,” she says.
Last year, she moved her whole family to the forest.
While cult leaders are central to their cults, they still need to amass a following.
Dr. Geoffrey Wango, a professor of psychology at Nairobi University, says that, paradoxically, destructive cults give people hope.
“The psychology of it is simple. The cult leader offers hope and promise and seeks easy targets,” he says.
In the case of Mackenzie, he says, the hope is one of salvation and to turn your back on the stresses of daily survival.
While the draw of cults is universal, Wango believes that you can’t separate the central position of religion in Kenya.
Religion permeates right through the highest echelons of government. Kenya’s President Ruto became the country’s first evangelical president last year and built a place of worship in the presidential compound.
Ruto condemned the grim discovery at Shakahola in the strongest terms, saying “we must as a nation continue to be on the lookout for those who abuse even the religious sector,” adding that Mackenzie belongs in jail.
Poverty is also a significant factor in driving people to more extreme preachers, Wango said.
“People are looking for a way out of their poverty, a way out of their desperation. And here is a religion that offers them a way out,” he says.
Of course, there are extensive examples of the wealthy joining cults. The recent Nxivm cult in the US drew in the rich and powerful.
But Ross, who helped expose Nxivm, says cults exploit individual vulnerabilities.
“It could be anyone, but if someone is going through a difficult time in their life, or you lose your job, or do badly in school, or struggling financially, you are feeling unfulfilled, then a group like this comes along and it can be very alluring,” he says.
Once inside a cult, both agree that isolation – physical and mental – is a critical factor that helps drive the horrors of doomsday cults.
By 2018, Kenyan authorities started cracking down on Mackenzie. They arrested and detained him for his anti-government stance – but never prosecuted him.
“That is when he said that God had told him to close his church and that he was no longer a pastor,” says his former assistant pastor.
Mackenzie would soon start his forest scheme. Agnes says he charged them around $80 for a patch of land.
“There were more than a thousand people living in the forest,” she says.
The assistant pastor believes it was around 300 families.
Many people had no idea where their loved ones had disappeared to.
When Francis Wanje got wind earlier this year that his daughter and her family were inside the Shakahola forest with other cult members, his first reaction was that it had to be wrong.
“I could not even believe it. I was told something bad was happening in the forest. But I couldn’t understand how she could be there,” he says.
Wanje’s daughter and son-in-law both had decent jobs.
He knew that they were attending Mackenzie’s church. But when they moved to the forest, they told him they were relocating to a different part of Kenya.
“The social isolation is critical and has striking similarities with other destructive cults,” says Ross.
It’s in the forest that investigators say Mackenzie’s cult took on its final form.
In a court affidavit obtained by CNN, inspectors wrote that Mackenzie told his followers sometime early this year that the end of the world was imminent and that they should start fasting.
“He stated that fasting would start with the children until the last child died then followed by the youth, then women and lastly men and that he would be the last to die and ascend to heaven,” the affidavit reads.
Kenya’s state pathologist says many of the remains found show signs of extreme starvation, some were smothered, and a few showed blunt force trauma. There were scores of children amongst the dead.
After Wanje received his disturbing call he organized a private rescue mission to the forest where he says they found his oldest grandchild.
He was deeply malnourished – his two siblings were already dead.
Wanje says they were suffocated by their parents.
“It’s so painful, I could not even explain it because it’s something that I didn’t even think of in my life,” he says.
“And I wonder how my child, my daughter, could change to be such an animal to kill her own children just because she wanted to go see Jesus.”
Village elders in a nearby forest say they notified the authorities that starving children were escaping the forest from as early as late last year.
The president and other senior leaders have apologized to Kenyans for the slow response and made promises to regulate religious sects.
“Without a doubt, I can say definitively, had the police responded sooner, then lives would have been saved. I feel as a country we have failed these Kenyans,” says Khalid Hussein, the director of Haki Africa, a group that helped expose the cult.
Agnes says that as time went on, the life in the cult became more extreme.
“Each month there were meetings where he told us what Jesus had said. It was heartbreaking,” she says.
Agnes says she escaped the forest in September last year when she was told she couldn’t get help from another woman to deliver her third child. Mackenzie’s spell was broken.
But the aftershocks of the Shakahola massacre could be long-lasting. Police pulled scores of followers from the forest – many of whom didn’t want to be rescued.
Even those who were dying.
“When they got to the hospital some gave false names and others refused to be treated, they didn’t want to be helped, they didn’t want to miss out,” says Dr. David Man’ong’o, medical superintendent of the Malindi subcounty hospital.
Eventually, they had to hand them back to police.
The rescued followers, many of them either witnesses or still under suspicion, are being kept in a nearby rescue center where therapists are trying to break their emotional and psychological ties to Mackenzie.
Last week, the Director of Public Prosecutions said that 65 people rescued from the forest were charged with attempted suicide for refusing to eat.
Rick Ross says it could be a months-long process to “deprogram” cult members.
For loved ones of those who survived, it will also be a painful road. Wanje says he will get his grandson back in a few weeks.
“He went through hell. He went through hell. When he was rescued, he told them that if you had come maybe a bit later, he would have already gone to see Jesus because his grave was already there,” he says.
by tyler | Jun 19, 2023 | africa, CNN
His worn trousers bagging over the top of borrowed rubber rain boots, Kueaa Darhok attempts to make his way through the sucking mud and deep-set puddles, on his way to the communal feeding kitchen at the center of the transit camp he now calls home.
There, under his calming gaze and soft-spoken reassurances, Sudanese refugees and returning South Sudanese wait as aid workers and local women ladle through steel pots filled with lentils and porridge.
In Sudan, Darhok, who is of South Sudanese origin, was the headmaster of an English language secondary school in the capital Khartoum, where he taught his students texts by legendary African authors like Chinua Achebe to instil in them, he says, a sense of cultural pride.
After fighting broke out over two months ago in Khartoum, he and his family made the terrifying journey back to South Sudan and he has become a community elder here at the camp.
Set up a week into the fighting in Sudan, when desperate families arrived seeking shelter, the Renk transit camp near the border of South Sudan and Sudan was not supposed to hold more than 3,000 people. It now houses more than double that. There are no sanitation facilities, not enough waterproof sheets and not enough food. Not enough of anything.
“I eat once a day, sometimes not even that,” Darhok says, keeping an eye on the meal distribution. “Most of the men here are the same, so that the most vulnerable – the women and children – can eat.”
Even then, Darhok says, not all those queuing up will get food, and they’ll return to expectant families empty-handed.
The UN estimates at least 860 people have been killed since fighting erupted on April 15 between Sudan’s Armed Forces and the rival paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
With 6,000 people injured across Sudan as of June 3, half a million people have fled the country and more than 1.4 million are internally displaced.
Blighted by decades of fighting both before and after independence from the Republic of Sudan, South Sudan was already Africa’s largest refugee crisis, with 2.2 million people displaced outside the country’s borders and 2.3 million internally displaced. Now at least 800,000 South Sudanese have been driven back by the fighting in Sudan.
A spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Renk, Charlotte Hallqvist told CNN that an average of 1,500 people have been arriving daily since the fighting began in Sudan, adding to the burden of a country where 75% of the population are in need of assistance.
Hallqvist says the UN’s emergency response was already critically underfunded, “and the new emergency is adding additional strain to already limited resources.”
To respond to the Sudan crisis in neighboring countries, the UN needs $566 million, with the South Sudan response alone in need of $96 million.
According to UNHCR figures, two months into the crisis, international donors have so far only contributed 10% of the total figure, and 15% of the overall Sudan regional emergency response.
On June 19, the United Nations, the governments of Egypt, Germany, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the African Union and the European Union will convene a High-level Pledging Event to support the humanitarian response in Sudan and the region in a bid to drive up donor contributions.
For many here in Renk, it’s too late; the international community’s delayed response has already cost lives.
Malnutrition and unsanitary conditions are triggering an epidemic of communicable diseases, and every day, Darhok tells us, a little boy or girl dies.
A CNN team visiting the camp witnessed the burial of one boy, not quite two years old, who had died in the early hours of that morning from measles.
His mother and grandmother sat in shocked silence as men shoveled earth onto his grave at the local cemetery, pausing to plant a spindly wooden cross before heading back to their own tents and their own vulnerable families, carrying with them the specter of a death that could have been prevented.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the amount of funding needed by the UN as a whole to respond to the Sudan crisis.
