Devoted self-made filmmaker Nabwana Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey (IGG), who shoots ultra-violent action movies in a slum at the cost of about $200 apiece, and has been lovingly nicknamed ‘Uganda’s Tarantino’ by his fans, says his version of ‘The Expendables’ is coming soon.

Nabwana produces, directs, shoots, writes, and edits his films. Wakaliga, a slum in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, is his action set – and it has already been dubbed’Wakaliwood’.

Shot at an average price of $200 US dollars, Nabwana’s films are super-low budget and involve the whole crew in various stages of the process. Some actors play several characters in the same production and wear face masks to look different. Nabwana’s wife has become a pro at special effects: they use condoms filled with water mixed with food coloring to mimic blood. The actors come on set wearing their own clothes and hardly get any pay.

“I like acting because I need to be more famous. Yeah. That’s my dream. So that’s why, you see, I act all the time. The director told me to do anything – I can do,” actor Kizza Mansuri said on the set of one of Nabwana’s movies.

An incredibly productive director, Nabwana shoots a new film roughly every month, then edits everything himself on a computer that he had assembled on his own. He uses software from the internet to create graphics imitating gunfire, blood spills and more complex settings involving helicopters and world landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben.

Nabwana’s Ramon Film Productions, which got its name from Rachel and Monica, the grandmothers who raised him, rose to fame with the 2011 blockbuster “Who killed captain Alex?” Its trailer even made it online, subsequently becoming an internet sensation. The plot is hard to follow with all the fighting, but it revolves around the police, drug trafficking and, yes, more fighting. At some stage a decision was made to ditch plastic guns for something more serious, as Nabwana felt the actors needed to feel the weight of “real” ammo. So they started producing their own mock guns from any available spare parts, such ones from a motorcycle. They even created a life-size helicopter prop.

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The European Union (EU) is reportedly planning to convince President Robert Mugabe’s government to allow United Nations emissaries to observe the 2018 elections.

Diplomatic sources said that Britain was pushing for the adoption of a resolution within the EU to force Zimbabwe to accept UN observers ‘in order to avoid a repeat of the disputes that have characterised previous elections’.

“Britain is concerned about the effects of another contested poll, hence, it is doing everything to try and have the EU as a bloc to persuade Mugabe to accept a UN-supervised or at the very least monitored one in 2018,” a diplomatic source in Harare said.

“In fact, the EU is already supporting Zec (Zimbabwe Electoral Commission) with financial and technical assistance in the build-up to the poll that is expected to be viciously fought, given there is a likelihood that the ruling Zanu PF could field a candidate other than Mugabe.”

Contacted for comment early this week, the British embassy in Harare could neither confirm nor deny the claims.

“It is very important that any future Zimbabwean elections are carried out in compliance with regional and international best practice, and in line with the SADC principles and guidelines, which call for effective domestic and international observation. This has consistently been the UK’s position over a number of electoral cycles,” the embassy said in a statement.

Contacted for comment, Information minister, Christopher Mushohwe said: “I do not have background to these issues in order to make an informed position except for newspaper reports and what you are telling me now. But I will try to check the linkage between these issues of biometric voting, the EU’s technical assistance to Zec and the 2018 elections.”

Mugabe, 91, has already been declared the Zanu PF candidate for the 2018 elections, although there are growing fears that age and failing health could force him to retire earlier than expected.

The EU ambassador to Zimbabwe, Philippe van Damme, was coy when contacted for comment on the issue, saying it was ‘a bit pre-mature’ to talk about the monitoring of an election that is still almost 30 months away.

“Election observation is decided at a later stage and we are looking at the second half of 2017 or early 2018 when the government will invite the international community to have a look at the situation in the country ahead of the elections,” he said yesterday.

He, however, revealed that the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) late last year had a ‘needs assessment team in Zimbabwe’.

“In October last year, the UNDP had a team in Zimbabwe to assess Zec’s electoral needs. There is a draft agreement that the government is now studying so they will have to make a decision. Once a decision is made, we will expect the government or Zec to call for an all-stakeholders meeting at which finer details should be discussed and agreed upon,” the EU representative said.

“As for the issue of the biometric voting system, it is not up to the EU, but the government and stakeholders in Zimbabwe. Once they agree, there will need to be a budget that can then be supported by international partners. The support from the international community cannot be substitutive.”

Zec chairperson, Justice Rita Makarau confirmed that the electoral management body had received some technical assistance from the UNDP.

“We are still working on modalities of working together, but the UNDP has provided assistance to allow us to hire consultants. It is out of these consultations that we will come up with a project or projects to be funded,” said Justice Makarau.

Asked if these projects could include a biometric voting system for 2018, the Zec boss said: “The consultations will look at voting systems and biometric is just, but one of them.”

Meanwhile, opposition parties have welcomed the demand for the UN to observe the 2018 elections.

“We welcome this especially given the fact that the UN is working with Zec. It is not sufficient, but fundamental. However, we need to know the role of the Executive in the running of elections because there are some decisions that will affect this process and outcomes materially,” MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai said.

People’s Democratic Party leader Tendai Biti said while his party welcomed the call for a UN-supervised election, he did not see Zanu PF agreeing to the demands.

“It is important to understand from the outset that given the history of Zanu PF, we will be naïve to think that they will accept such demands. They will obviously find it very hard to comply,” Biti said.

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The United Nations Security Council should place an arms embargo on South Sudan, while the oil-rich country’s President Salva Kiir and a rebel leader qualify to be sanctioned over atrocities in a two-year civil war, UN sanctions monitors said in an annual report.

The confidential report by a UN panel that monitors the conflict in South Sudan for the Security Council stated that Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar are still completely in charge of their forces and are therefore directly to blame for killing civilians and other actions that warrant sanctions.

The 15-member Security Council has long-threatened to impose an arms embargo, but veto power Russia, backed by council member Angola, have been reluctant to support such an action. Russia’s UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said yesterday he was concerned that an arms embargo would be one-sided because it would be easier to enforce on the government.

The panel asked the council to blacklist ‘high-level decision makers responsible for the actions and policies that threaten the peace, security and stability of the country’.

The names of the individuals the panel recommend for sanctions in the form of an international travel ban and asset freeze were not included in the body of the report. But a diplomat familiar with the contents said that a highly confidential annex calls for blacklisting both Kiir and Machar.

A political dispute between Kiir and Machar, who was once Kiir’s deputy, sparked the civil war. But it has widened and reopened ethnic fault lines between Kiir’s Dinka and Machar’s Nuer people. More than 10,000 people have been killed.

The panel wrote that ‘there is clear and convincing evidence that most of the acts of violence committed during the war, including the targeting of civilians … have been directed by or undertaken with the knowledge of senior individuals at the highest levels of the government and within the opposition’.

However, they said the government appears to have been responsible for a larger share of the bloodshed in the country in 2015.

‘While civilians have been and continue to be targeted by both sides, including because of their tribal affiliation, the panel has determined that, in contrast to 2014, the government has been responsible for the vast majority of human rights violations committed in South Sudan (since March 2015)’, the U.N.’s panel coordinator, Payton Knopf, told the Security Council sanctions committee on Jan. 14, according to prepared remarks circulated to council members.

The South Sudan mission to the United Nations in New York was not immediately available to comment on the report.

The conflict in South Sudan, whose 2011 secession from Sudan had long enjoyed the support of the United States, has torn apart the world’s youngest country. The UN panel reported that some 2.3 million people have been displaced since war broke out in December 2013, while some 3.9 million face severe food shortages.

The UN report described how Kiir’s government bought at least four Mi-24 attack helicopters in 2014 from a private Ukrainian company at a cost of nearly $43 million.

‘They have been vital in providing an important advantage in military operations, have facilitated the expansion of the war and have emboldened those in the government who are seeking a military solution to the conflict at the expense of the peace process’, according to the report.

Knopf told the council that Machar’s rebels were trying to ‘acquire shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to counter the threat of attack helicopters, specifically citing the need to continue and indeed escalate the fighting’.

Both sides signed a peace deal in August but have consistently broken a ceasefire, while human rights violations have “continued unabated and with full impunity,” the panel wrote.

According to the report, those violations include extrajudicial killings, torture, sexual violence, extrajudicial arrest and detention, abductions, forced displacement, the use and recruitment of children, beatings, looting and the destruction of livelihoods and homes.

The panel said that almost every attack on a village by the warring parties involved the rape and abduction of women and girls and that ‘all parties deliberately use rape as a tactic of war, often in gruesome incidents of gang rape’.

Knopf told the council committee that the human cost of the war was comparable to the conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen relative to South Sudan’s population of 12 million. And he said there was ‘a real risk of even larger scale mass atrocities within South Sudan’.

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