Poll observers declare Zimbabwe elections generally 'free and fair'

Johannesburg, August 1 2013: The African Union's (AU) top poll observer has said that Zimbabwe's presidential elections have passed off smoothly.

According to News24, former Nigerian leader Olusegun Obasanjo, who leads the 69-member observation team, said that the election were conducted quite peacefully and were free and fair.

Earlier, the AU mission had been criticized by Morgan Tsvangirai, challenger of President Robert Mugabe, for manipulation in the electoral roll.

It is said that the electoral list contains many duplicate and ghostly voters, the report added.

The Election Resource Center (ERC), an NGO which is collating reports of problems, has claimed that it has received multiple complaints from voters on improper conduct of the elections.

Source: New Kerala.
Link: http://www.newkerala.com/news/story/49336/poll-observers-declare-zimbabwe-elections-generally-free-and-fair.html.

Nigeria seeks farming revival to break oil curse

BY JOE BROCK
SAULAWA, Nigeria
Thu Jul 4, 2013

(Reuters) - Down a winding dirt track in this sleepy village in northern Nigeria lies a corn farm which looks much like the dozens that surround it. The difference is, this one is turning a profit.

"I can barely lift my 8-year-old. He's the fattest in the village," said Ibrahim Mustapha, 50, drawing laughter from his fellow farmers as he pretends to lift up his chubby son.

The Babban Gona or "Great Farm" project, in northern Kaduna state, is one of a handful where private investment is helping former subsistence farmers like Mustapha make profits for themselves and the companies backing them.

When President Goodluck Jonathan was elected two years ago, he pledged reforms that would transform the lives of tens of millions of farmers who live on less than $2 a day despite occupying some of Africa's most fertile land.

Oil remains the main source of foreign currency and state revenues, but agriculture is by far the biggest contributor to GDP, making up 40 percent of Africa's second largest economy.

With 170 million mouths to feed and a growing food import bill thanks to the disarray in the farming sector, agriculture ministry officials say there's no time to lose.

If productivity does not improve Nigeria could face a food crisis within a decade, its current account surplus would be wiped out and the credit worthiness of Africa's second biggest debt issuer would be under threat.

"If we did nothing, it would be a disaster," Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina told Reuters in the capital.

"We don't eat oil, we don't drink it ... We cannot sustain the amount of money we use to import food," Adesina said, a Nigerian flag hanging behind his office chair.

In some cases, the imports substitute for things Nigerians are growing but can't get to market or lack the means to process.

The country is the second largest grower of citrus fruit in the world after China and yet it spends $200 million a year on imported fruit juice while its own produce rots, Adesina said.

It also produces 1.5 million metric tons (1 metric ton = 1.1023 tons) of tomatoes annually of which 45 percent perish, while consumers spend $360 million on tomato paste imported from countries such as Italy and China.

CURING DUTCH DISEASE

To succeed, Adesina's reforms will need to reverse the inadvertent damage done to the sector by Africa's earliest and biggest oil and gas boom, which crowded out other commodities.

In the 1960s, Nigeria was the biggest exporter of peanuts in the world and had 27 percent of the palm oil trade. It remains one of the world's top cocoa growers, but production and bean quality have declined since their heyday in the 1970s.

While an elite allied to a series of military dictatorships grew rich on the spoils of the energy sector, millions of mostly subsistence farmers were given little or no help at all.

The result: Nigeria is now the world's second largest importer of rice and the biggest buyer of U.S. wheat, while much of its own fertile land lies fallow. A booming population has sent its food import bill rocketing to around $11 billion a year - equivalent to more than a third of the federal budget.

Agriculture also offers the best chance to cut unemployment, which feeds an Islamist insurgency in the north and oil theft in the south. Unemployment is 23 percent and youth unemployment double that, national statistics suggest.

"Poverty is the source of a lot of the insecurity problems we have. A hungry man is an angry man," Adesina said.

The minister plans to create 3.5 million new jobs in agriculture and boost food production by 20 million metric tons by 2015, the year of the next national election.

To achieve this, he wants to boost access to microfinance for farmers and draw in $10 billion of foreign investment into farming and food processing.

He has received tentative praise for early successes from foreign diplomats, bankers and aid agencies, but big agro-business projects have yet to take off.

Adesina took a corrupt fertilizer subsidy out of politicians' hands and now farmers are texted subsidy vouchers directly to their mobile phones so they can recoup from fertilizer sellers, a policy used in Kenya's farming reforms.

Seventy percent of farmers now receive subsidized fertilizer and seeds, compared with 11 percent under the corrupt program previously run by state governments, Adesina said.

LONG ROAD AHEAD

Production of rice, cassava, wheat, sorghum, and corn are rising and cocoa, Nigeria's most important export crop, looks set to go up by more than a third this season.

In 2012, agriculture exports rose by 128 billion naira ($788 million) and food imports fell by 850 billion, Adesina says.

Foreign investors such as food giant Cargill, seed company Syngenta, brewer SABMiller and Africa's richest man Aliko Dangote are planning to build everything from fertilizer plants to food processing factories.

Yet rice imports still soak up $7 million a day, while poor infrastructure and policy flip-flopping have in the past seen farming potential wasted. Farmers needs infrastructure to get goods to market -- and rural Nigeria's is as woeful as it gets.

Nigerian billionaire Dangote has pledged to spend $35 million on a tomato paste plant in the northern city of Kano and $45 million in Cross River state to process pineapple juice.

Adesina says he has received $8 billion in commitments but such promises are often not kept in Nigeria. Cargill and SABMiller told Reuters they are only "considering" investing.

"I would estimate that no more than one dollar of investment actually occurs for every $100 of announced commitments," said Fola Fagbule, an Africa-focused investment banker in Lagos.

A central bank initiative has issued guarantees on around 25 billion naira of agriculture loans since it began in July last year, lifting lending to the sector to around 4 percent of total loans, from 1.5 percent at end-2009, the bank says.

The World Bank is putting in $100 million into agriculture, while British and U.S. aid projects pump in tens of millions.

This barely scratches the $10 billion Adesina says the sector needs by 2015. Smallholders say banks still don't lend to them, while the scheme doles out cheap money to big firms.

"We've heard it all before and I have never seen it get better," says Alhaji, a farmer wrestling with two scrawny long-horned cows dragging a rusty plough through a field.

"I have 15 children and ... we barely get enough food to feed ourselves," he said.

BEARING FRUIT?

A few success stories nonetheless give cause for optimism.

Farmer Mustapha says he made $1,350 per hectare from his harvest after paying back private firm Doreo Partners, which runs the Babban Gona project, compared to previous years where he might earn $200 per hectare.

"Now I want to grow my farm, I have so much space I never used. Now I will send my children to school," he said, while behind him mostly unused farmland stretched to the horizon.

Doreo is working with 600 farmers. It has ambitious plans to boost this to 500,000 by 2020, and 5 million by 2030.

"I know it sounds ambitious but it's been done elsewhere and Nigeria has so much easy-to-reach potential," said Kola Masha, the company's head.

Masha is attempting to emulate giant food cooperatives like CHS in the U.S. or India's dairy franchise Amul, who make huge profits while helping millions of smallholder farmers.

He gives farmers high-quality fertilizer, seeds, equipment and expertise on credit to massively increase their yields, while negotiating with firms like Nestle to buy the produce at higher prices than the farmers could get themselves.

Farmers working with Masha, he said, are using 40 times more fertilizer than neighbors who could never afford that amount.

"It's early days but I'm more optimistic than I've ever been," he said.

(Editing by Tim Cocks and Giles Elgood)

Source: Reuters.
Link: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/04/us-nigeria-agriculture-insight-idUSBRE96305A20130704.

Russia kicks off Sochi Games with hope and hubris

February 07, 2014

SOCHI, Russia (AP) — A Russia in search of global vindication kicked off the Sochi Olympics looking more like a Russia that likes to party, with a pulse-raising opening ceremony about fun and sports instead of terrorism, gay rights and coddling despots.

And that's just the way Russian President Vladimir Putin wants these Winter Games to be. The world's premier athletes on ice and snow have more to worry about than geopolitics as they plunge into the biggest challenges of their lives on the mountain slopes of the Caucasus and in the wet-paint-fresh arenas on the shores of the Black Sea.

But watch out for those Russians on their home turf. A raucous group of Russian athletes had a message for their nearly 3,000 rivals in Sochi, marching through Fisht Stadium singing that they're "not gonna get us!"

Superlatives abounded and the mood soared as Tchaikovsky met pseudo-lesbian pop duo Tatu and their hit, "Not Gonna Get Us." Russian TV presenter Yana Churikova shouted: "Welcome to the center of the universe!"

Yet no amount of cheering could drown out the real world. Fears of terrorism, which have dogged these games since the Putin won them amid controversy seven years ago, were stoked during the ceremony itself. A passenger aboard a flight bound for Istanbul said there was a bomb on board and tried to divert the plane to Sochi. Authorities said the plane landed safely in Turkey, and the suspected hijacker — who did not have a bomb — was subdued.

The show opened with an embarrassing hiccup, as one of five snowflakes failed to unfurl as planned into the Olympic rings, forcing organizers to jettison a fireworks display and disrupting one of the most symbolic moments in an opening ceremony.

That allowed for an old Soviet tradition of whitewashing problems to resurface, as state-run broadcaster Rossiya 1 substituted a shot during from a rehearsal with the rings unfolding successfully into their live broadcast.

Also missing from the show: Putin's repression of dissent, and inconsistent security measures at the Olympics, which will take place just a few hundred miles (kilometers) away from the sites of a long-running insurgency and routine militant violence.

And the poorly paid migrant workers who helped build up the Sochi site from scratch, the disregard for local residents, the environmental abuse during construction, the pressure on activists, and the huge amounts of Sochi construction money that disappeared to corruption.

Some world leaders purposely stayed away, but U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and dozens of others were in Sochi for the ceremony. He didn't mention the very real anger over a Russian law banning gay "propaganda" aimed at minors that is being used to discriminate against gay people.

But IOC President Thomas Bach won cheers for addressing it Friday, telling the crowd it's possible to hold Olympics "with tolerance and without any form of discrimination for whatever reason." For all the criticism, there was no shortage of pride at the ceremony in what Russia has achieved with these games, after building up an Olympic Park out of swampland. The head of the Sochi organizing committee, Dmitry Chernyshenko, captured the mood of many Russians present when he said, "We're now at the heart of that dream that became reality."

"The games in Sochi are our chance to show the whole world the best of what Russia is proud of," he said. "Our hospitality, our achievements, our Russia!" The ceremony presented the Putin's version of today's Russia: a country with a rich and complex history emerging confidently from a rocky two decades and now capable of putting on a major international sports event.

Putin himself was front and center, declaring the games open from his box high above the stadium floor. Earlier, he looked down as the real stars of the games — those athletes, dressed in winter wear of so many national colors to ward off the evening chill and a light dusting of man-made snow — walked onto a satellite image of the earth projected on the floor, the map shifting so the athletes appeared to emerge from their own country.

As always, Greece — the birthplace of Olympic competition — came first in the parade of nations. Five new teams, all from warm weather climates, joined the Winter Olympians for the first time. Togo's flagbearer looked dumbstruck with wonder, but those veterans from the Cayman Islands had the style to arrive in shorts!

The smallest teams often earned the biggest cheers from the crowd of 40,000, with an enthusiastic three-person Venezuelan team winning roars of approval as flagbearer and alpine skier Antonio Pardo danced and jumped along to the electronic music.

Only neighboring Ukraine, scene of a tense and ongoing standoff between a pro-Russian president and Western-leaning protesters, could compete with those cheers. That is, until the Russians arrived. Walking in last to a thundering bass line that struggled to overcome the ovations from the hometown crowd, the Russians reveled in all the attention. Their feeling could perhaps best be summed up by Russian singers Tatu, whose hit "Not Gonna Get Us" accompanied them to their seats.

Russians place huge significance in the Olympics, carefully watching the medal count — their dismal 15-medal performance in Vancouver four years ago is on the minds of many. These games are particularly important, as many Russians are still insecure about their place in the world after the end of the Cold War and the years since that have seen dominance of the United States and China.

International politics were never far beneath the surface. One member of the VIP crowd carrying the Olympic flag was Anastasia Popova, a young television reporter with the state-owned Rossiya TV channel, best known for her reporting on Syria's civil war. Putin and Russian state media have stood strongly behind Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Popova's coverage laid the blame for the war squarely on Syrian rebels.

But back to that Russian pride. As Churikova rallied the crowd to scream "louder than ever," she told the fans in their cool blue seats their keepsakes from the night would last 1,000 years. When explaining the show would be hosted in English, French and Russian, she joked that it didn't matter, because in Sochi, everyone "speaks every language in the world."

Viewers of the Olympic ceremony romped through the wonders of Russian cultural and scientific achievements — from Malevich's avant-garde paintings to Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," from Mendeleev's periodic table of elements to the string of Soviet "firsts" in space.

Capping it all off, Russian hockey great Vladislav Tretiak and three-time gold medalist Irina Rodnina joined hands to light the Olympic cauldron. He's often called the greatest goaltender of all time by those who saw him play, she won 10 world pairs figure skating titles in a row.

That was how it ended. At the top, the show — and the games — easily avoided talking about prickly issues even when the women in Tatu took the stage. The duo, who put on a lesbian act that is largely seen as an attention-getting gimmick, merely held hands during their performance on this night, stopping short of the groping and kissing of their past performances.

This time? Their lead-in act was the Red Army Choir MVD singing Daft Punk's Grammy-winning "Get Lucky."

AP Sports Writers Stephen Wilson and Jon Krawczynski contributed to this report.

Washington Post. Sochi: Failures everywhere. Even no lamps at bedside tables

4 February 2014

Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent Kathy Lally, who is now in Sochi, describes the situation in this Russian-occupied Emirate city in a report entitled "Olympic dream in Sochi: Internet in the hotel".

Putin is counting off the final days until the opening ceremonies of the games on Friday, and that’s probably time enough to get the Internet working in the hotels.

But getting grass to grow? Perhaps not. There’s so much goopy earth everywhere, it could be time to call out the Olympic mud wrestlers. Finding homes for the packs of hungry stray dogs? That would get at the spirit of the games.

Putin and his deputies here have repeatedly promised that every detail will have fallen into perfect place. No doubt that includes hopes of rooms finished in time to house every spectator who has already paid for one, lamps at every bedside table (many are still undelivered) and bulbs for those already in place (not yet).

As every Russian is fond of saying, hope dies last.

From the air at night, everything looks ready. The Olympic coastal cluster glows hospitably. Lights gleam in the hotel windows.

Check into one of the media hotels, and thank goodness the fire hoses are in place. Open the white cabinet in the bathroom, a miniature hose lies curled inside, ready to extinguish the threat of a bathroom blaze.

There’s also a sink — a tiny, tiny sink — big enough to wash your hands unless they’re particularly meaty. The little sink sits atop an exposed white plastic pipe, stuck to the wall and surrounded by an unruly gob of caulk. Might as well forget about a shower curtain. The way the bathroom is set up there’s no place to affix a rod.

The single room has two lamps — which don’t have light bulbs, but that’s okay because they aren’t near any unused outlets.

An overhead chandelier has five shades, three of them with bulbs. There’s no phone. The television doesn’t work. A brainstorm interrupts an unsuccessful effort to plod through the manual — in Russian. There’s no battery in the remote!

Still no luck. Turns out the TV needs Internet to operate. Any moment, a manager assures, and WiFi will be available — at least in the lobby. The rooms have their own fuse boxes, where some kind of meter runs inside, raising fears they’re going to charge extra for electricity.

Most of the construction equipment has been cleared away, and the landscapers have moved in with trees and shrubs, stuck here and there among clods of earth, pools of rainwater and the mud. The turf men are nowhere to be seen, and the soil hardly seems prepared for them.

Debris-filled dumpsters still sit near some of the hotels. Men carry boxes in and out of the buildings late at night. In the morning, other men with brushes and cans of white paint stand in the rain, dabbing at the sides of hotels.

Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2014/02/04/18838.shtml.

SO. Threat to athletes and tourists in Sochi comes from KGB and Russian mobsters

6 February 2014

The largest American TV channel reported about danger of hitting Americans in the Russian-occupied Caucasus Emirate. In a report entitled "Russian Spies, Mobsters Hacking Your Smartphones", the TV channel says in particular:

"Spectators in the Black Sea town will face a stealthier threat to their digital lives from Russian spies and tech savvy mobsters, experts and security sources told ABC News.

Russian law allows its intelligence agents to do electronic snooping on anyone inside the country, meaning the phones and personal computers of thousands of foreign visitors, including Americans, are fair game.

But even outside of the law, Russian organized crime groups also are well known for hacking smartphones and email for information they use for illicit profit.

"The host government, private enterprise and individuals pose a big threat to people traveling to the Sochi Games, in respect to monitoring conversations on cell phones and intercepting texts and emails", one Olympic security contractor told ABC News last week.

"It should certainly be expected," agreed a senior US intelligence official, who told ABC News that the influx of tens of thousands of American spectators and dignitaries will be "an intelligence bonanza" for both Russian spies and organized crime groups.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's domestic spying agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB) (earlier, the same Russian gang was called the KGB - KC), will target dignitaries for intelligence collection.

Mobsters hack devices for passwords and data to facilitate digital larceny and, at times, can be used as proxies by the FSB for any number of tasks, sources said.

For instance, a recent cybersecurity report by private firm CrowdStrike fingered Russian intelligence as likely involved with, or at least aware of, the work of a hacker group known as "Energetic Bear," which has targeted Western energy interests.

US officials generally are required to trade in their regular smartphones for "clean" devices when traveling to countries such as Russia and China, which have the most sophisticated spy operations. The assumption of government security officers, based on past experience, is that smartphones operating on foreign networks are easily comprised by foreign intelligence services.

The Russian electronic surveillance program, called SORM, rivals any American domestic FBI or NSA surveillance program -- with one key difference: the Russians don't need the formality of a court order to suck up all of the targeted person's data, which is archived for three years.

Security services are, as required by law, hardwired into the communications infrastructure here so they don't need the phone and internet companies to give them the data.

NBC, which is telecasting the Games as the US rights holder, has warned employees that emails sent or received while in Sochi may not be private, according to sources.

"The Russians will own your communications when you go there. The only way to guard against that is to take a clean device and use a temporary email address", Joel Brenner, who served as US National Counterintelligence Executive from 2006-2009, told ABC News.

Smartphones can be penetrated and comprised anytime they are out of the owner's hands, such as passing through an airport security screening checkpoint, or remotely by hackers through compromised cell signal towers or illicit mobile relay devices.

"The risk is the theft of personal data stored on a smartphone: your contacts, banking info, etcetera," the security contractor working on the Sochi Games said.

"Criminal elements have ready access to the cell towers in Russia". Several current and former U.S. officials confirmed that organized crime figures in Russia are believed to have some access to cell towers in Sochi.

"That possibility exists", a US official involved in securing the Games warned last week about the threat posed by both spy and hacker.

"I wouldn't say everyone who goes will be considered a high value cyber-target, but there is a high likelihood that it will happen".

Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2014/02/06/18848.shtml.

Russian news agency hit by cyberattack

July 22, 2013

MOSCOW, July 22 (UPI) -- Russian state media agency RIA Novosti said it was struck by one of the largest cyberattacks on its website so far this year.

Anatoly Stoyanovsky, director of RIA Novosti's software development, said the website was hit by a denial-of-service attack last week.

"Our on-duty services immediately responded to the emergency. Automatic filtering mechanisms were activated as planned," he was quoted Friday as saying. "We saw the peak number of requests per minute reaching some 150,000, but within several minutes, malicious traffic was blocked."

He did not indicate blame in the attack. Denial-of-service attacks overwhelm a website with data requests, forcing some computer systems to crash.

Frustration with the government of President Vladimir Putin has been high since his election to a third non-consecutive term last year. Stoyanovsky didn't indicate whether the attack was foreign or domestic.

The Russian government said Monday it lifted a ban on the political activities of the opposition Left Front movement. Its leader, Sergei Udaltsov, is under house arrest for allegedly plotting against the state.

Intelligence agencies across the world have said cyber issues are an emerging threat to national security.

Source: United Press International (UPI).
Link: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/Technology/2013/07/22/Russian-news-agency-hit-by-cyberattack/UPI-37161374502651/.

Thousands protest sentence for Putin critic

Jul. 18, 2013

by Anna Arutunyan
Special for USA TODAY

MOSCOW - Thousands of people protested in the streets Thursday steps away from the Kremlin to express anger over the jailing of an opponent to President Vladimir Putin on what they alleged are false charges to keep him quiet.

Alexei Navalny, a Moscow mayoral candidate who blew the whistle on high-level corruption and mocked the Kremlin, was sentenced to five years in a penal colony on embezzlement charges.

"We were supposed to go to a museum, but the verdict changed that, and now we're here," said Anna Abdelkhabi, a mother of three who turned up at the protest with her children. "Of course, it was obvious that [Navalny would be found guilty], but on the other hand, there was this tiny, tiny bit of hope."

"I expected the verdict," said Stas Starevsky, an information technology specialist, "but what no one wanted to believe happened."

The sentence is the latest in a crackdown on dissent that followed Putin's re-election to a third presidential term in March 2012. The Kremlin has arrested opposition activists and pushed for passage of laws that sharply increased fines for Russians who take part in protests not permitted by the government.

Protesters who found out about the demonstration via Facebook showed up at Manezh Square, just off Red Square, to find the area blocked by police. They gathered on the streets around Manezh Square and near the State Duma, Russia's lower branch of parliament.

Police moved in to disperse protesters before midnight and detained those who refused to leave. More than 100 people were detained, Gazeta.ru reported.

A court in Kirov found Navalny and a co-defendant guilty of embezzling $500,000 worth of timber from the state-owned KirovLes company. The embezzlement, which Navalny denied, was alleged to have taken place in 2009 while he was an adviser to the Kirov regional governor.

Navalny handed his mobile phone and watch to his wife, Yulia, before bailiffs took custody of him.

Navalny wrote about corruption at state-owned companies in which he owned shares, and his blog had hundreds of thousands of readers. With the help of volunteer lawyers, he used property records abroad to identify top officials and lawmakers who own undeclared foreign assets and hold foreign citizenship.

Navalny called the dominant United Russia party "the party of crooks and thieves," and he targeted a wide circle of Putin loyalists, from members of parliament to state bankers. He chronicled all the promises Putin failed to deliver on.

When charges of fraud in the 2011 parliamentary elections led to massive protests, Navalny became a leader of the movement. He announced his candidacy to run for mayor of Moscow in an election in September.

If Navalny's verdict comes into force before the election date, he will be forced by law to step down from the race. Amnesty International condemned the trial as politically motivated. White House spokesman Jay Carney said the United States was "deeply disappointed" in the verdict.

Others didn't buy the idea that Navalny was railroaded by Putin-controlled courts.

"He deserved it," said Tatyana Krainskaya, a Moscow resident. "Whatever he did, that's what he deserved. He stole the timber, that's clear."

Pro-Kremlin analysts and politicians denied that the case was politically motivated.

"The verdict against Navalny is a direct warning to our 'fifth column,'" Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist LDPR party, posted on his Twitter. "That's the path for all who are connected to the West and work against Russia."

Source: Florida Today.
Link: http://www.floridatoday.com/usatoday/article/2555451.