The African Leaders Malaria Alliance (ALMA) met on the sidelines of the 26^th African Union Summit to celebrate unprecedented progress against malaria in Africa, reiterating their commitment to eliminating the killer disease on the continent by 2030.

Thirty-four Heads of State and Delegation joined the annual meeting, which was chaired by Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Dessalegn, the current chair of ALMA, who is to be succeeded by Chad President Idriss Déby Itno.

“We have an exceptionally strong platform from which we can now work to finally eliminate malaria from the continent once and for all,” said Déby.

Since 2000, malaria mortality rates in Africa have fallen by 66 percent overall and 71 percent among children under five.

“The African Leaders Malaria Alliance is a model for what we can do when we commit ourselves to a collective goal. Our progress is undeniable,” said Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, adding: “This is what it looks like when we work together – this is how we build a better future for Africa.”

At the meeting, ALMA presented its annual Awards for Excellence to 13 African countries that have shown commitment, innovation and progress in the fight against malaria.

The countries include Botswana, Cape Verde, Eritrea, Namibia, Rwanda, São Tomé and Príncipe, South Africa, and Swaziland for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target for malaria

Rwanda, Senegal and Liberia were awarded for Performance in Malaria Control between 2011 and 2015, while Mali, Guinea and Comoros were recognized for being the Most Improved in Malaria Control between 2011 and 2015.

“These are impressive achievements,” said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, adding that, “they are a result of your vision of a malaria-free world.”

Many African leaders have made fighting malaria a key focus over the past several years, assisted by commitments from donors such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the United States’ President’s Malaria Initiative, the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development and the French government.

But the job is not finished. There were 188 million case of malaria in Africa last year, and an African child still dies every two minutes from the disease.

“Despite the remarkable achievements, we should not lose sight that malaria remains a disease of poverty and a major public health concern particularly in Africa,” Prime Minister Dessalegn, said, adding: “We must therefore continue to invest in malaria interventions in order to reduce malaria cases and deaths.”

The leaders committed to achieving and sustaining high levels of coverage with effective interventions. They committed to increasing domestic public and private funding. They acknowledged the recent enhanced commitments by the U.K. and U.S. governments, and called for similar commitments from other partners, including supporting the replenishment of the Global Fund.

The leaders reviewed the ALMA Scorecard for Accountability and Action and the ALMA 2030 Scorecard Towards Malaria Elimination. Building on these, leaders committed to develop their own national malaria control and elimination scorecards with an accountability and action mechanism.

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The African Union has abandoned its plan to send 5,000 peacekeepers to help restore stability to troubled Burundi.

Officials said they would instead encourage political dialogue between Burundi’s opposing sides.

Burundi’s President Pierre Nkurunziza had fiercely opposed the AU plan’s to send peacekeepers.

His decision last April to seek a third term in office has led to ongoing violence and fears that Burundi is sliding into ethnic conflict.

At least 439 people have died and 240,000 have fled abroad since last April, the UN says.

The AU could have deployed troops without Burundi’s consent – a clause in its charter allows it to intervene in a member state because of grave circumstances, which include war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity – but it would have been the first time it had done so.

Top AU diplomat Ibrahima Fall said such a move would have been ‘unimaginable’.

AU Peace and Security Council Chief Smail Chergui said after the bloc’s meeting in Ethiopia: “We want dialogue with the government, and the summit decided to dispatch a high-level delegation.”

Earlier this week, human rights group Amnesty International published satellite images it said were believed to be five mass graves near Burundi’s capital Bujumbura, where security forces were accused of killing scores of people in December.

A fact-finding mission by the AU has reported arbitrary killings, torture and the ‘closure of some civil society organisations and the media’.

Mr Nkurunziza is a former leader of a Hutu rebel group, who has been in power since a 2005 peace deal. Both the government and the opposition are ethnically mixed.

Ethnic conflict between Hutus and Tutsis in the 1990s claimed an estimated 300,000 lives.

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The East African regional block, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), has urged President Salva Kiir and his government to suspend the implementation of the 28 states he created, saying the decision was ‘inconsistent’ with the peace agreement signed by warring parties in August 2015.

In a communiqué released yesterday after two days of meeting of the IGAD Council of Ministers, an IGAD policy-making body with membership of foreign ministers from its member states, the regional bloc also urged the parties to the agreement to soon form a transitional government of national unity (TGoNU) at the national level.

The statement said IGAD is concerned by the decision of President Kiir’s government to implement the order.

“Concerned by the recent decision of the Government of South Sudan to implement the October 2, 2015 Presidential Decree on the creation of 28 new states, given that such action is insistent with the terms of ARCSS (Agreement on Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan),” partly reads the statement, dated 31 January.

It called on the parties, the government, the armed opposition faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM-IO), and other partners in peace, to instead form a boundary commission with membership of all the parties to the peace agreement and review the process for creation of new states.

“Urges the Parties, subsequent to the formation of TGoNU at national level, in the absence of agreement on the creation of new states, to suspend further action implementing the operationalization of new states until an inclusive, participatory National Boundary Commission comprising all parties to ARCSS reviews proposed states and their boundaries, and that this review process occur, for a period of up to one month,” it said.

The statement further said in case the parties to the agreement will not agree on proposed states, they will revert to the provisions of the agreement which is based on 10 states.

IGAD however urged the parties to amend the constitution by incorporating the peace agreement into the constitution, but added that the parties should form a transitional unity government, even if there is no constitution in place, using the peace agreement as the supreme document, at least at the national level.

It however emphasized that the two parties should first deploy their joint integrated forces in the capital, Juba, as the first phase in the implementation of the peace agreement before a transitional unity government can be formed, further urging the parties to deploy the forces in Juba in the first week of February.

“Calls on the Parties to immediately implement, by no later than the first week of February 2016, the first phase of the Transitional Security Arrangements for Juba in order to provide for the establishment, without further delay, of the TGoNU,” says the communiqué.

The statement by IGAD, which mediated the peace talks for two years resulting to the peace agreement, implies that once joint forces are deployed in the capital, the parties should form the government at the national level as the 28 states are suspended and boundary body of membership of all the parties review the process.

As the regional body seems to encourage dialogue on creation of more states, it also recommends reverting to the existing 10 states should there be no agreement among the parties on the new states to create.

The 55th extraordinary session of IGAD foreign ministers also discussed peace and security in Somalia.

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African countries will not hesitate to walk away from the United Nations if Westerners continue to block efforts to reform and democratise the organisation, Zimbabwe President Robert Gabriel Mugabe has said.
In an address interrupted several times by thunderous applause, appreciative whistling and standing ovations from Heads of State and other delegates yesterday, the outgoing African Union Chair warned that the day was coming when the continent would say ‘enough was enough’.

The no-holds-barred speech, made as 91 year-old President Mugabe opened the 26th Ordinary Summit of the AU in Addis Ababa, was a tour de force in oratory and gave the world nearly an hour of the Zimbabwean leader at his imperious and peerless best on the international stage.

From the start, when giving an impassioned call to action on the Palestine issue, to the end when President Mugabe announced Chad’s President Idriss Déby Itno as his successor at the AU, the gloves were off.

Indeed, on assuming the Chairmanship, President Déby conceded that it was not everyone who could give such a frank talk on the state of Africa and the world.

President Mugabe spoke soon after Palestine’s President Mahmoud Abbas thanked Africa for its support for a two-state solution to end Israeli aggression in the Middle East.

Mugabe, credited before the Summit for bringing the Palestinian question back to the centre, rallied African support for fellow oppressed peoples.

He spoke with real fire about the world sitting back as Israel brutalised Palestine — he was to use similarly powerful language later on when denouncing global inaction over Morocco’s continued colonisation of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic — before neatly tying this in with the warning that continued injustice would see the continent abandon the UN.

UN Secretary-General Mr Ban Ki-Moon sat at the high table with President Mugabe, and nodded his head as the outgoing AU Chair passionately spelt out the travesty of denying African countries equality in the comity of nations.

“We are supposed to be free and independent Mr Ban Ki Moon; supposed to be free— the 54 countries (of Africa). We come to the United Nations for the ceremonial (General Assembly); every year, September, we are there.

“We pay lots of money, go there and attend the General Assembly and make speeches, go back home: year in year out.

“But the bosses in the Security Council say you shall never have the powers that we have as permanent members … Reform the Security Council!” President Mugabe thundered as African leaders stood as a body in sustained applause, the second such interlude of note after the earlier approbation following his remarks on justice for Palestine.

President Mugabe pressed home the point with a light touch that drew a mixture of laughs and applause when he continued: “I want to tell you, Mr Ban Ki-Moon, you are a good man. But, of course, that does not make you a fighter; it’s not what your mission was.”

Then it was back to straight shooting and the warning that Africa would pull out of the UN.
“We will fight for our own identity, for our own integrity and personality as Africans. We are Africans. If we decide – and we shall certainly do so one of these days – that down with the United Nations, (then) we are not members of it.

“Others are real members of it, we are artificial members of it. We can’t continue to be artificial members of it

How can only a handful of people (dominate the Security Council)?

“In fact, there is only America and the Europeans – those who say they are white-skinned. . .because they are white-skinned. ‘Anyone who is not like us shall not have the powers, strength and integrity that we have.’ If the United Nations is to survive, we must be equal members of it; equal members who can say when we go to the body, that we are now speaking fully as members with a voice that’s understood, respected and honoured.

“But no, that’s not it. We met in Swaziland years ago and we came up with (the) Ezulwini Consensus. We have said we want two permanent members with a veto if the veto is to continue. We don’t like it, but if the veto is to be retained those (African) members must also have it, but if the veto is to be abolished they shall be like others.”

The AU’s common position on UN reform as captured by the Ezulwini Consensus demands at least two permanent seats with veto power and five rotating seats on the Security Council.

Britain, China, France, Russia and the US are the current veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council.

China and Russia have been open to discussing reforms, as have emerging powers like India and Brazil who also want to sit on the Security Council.

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Plans to deploy Africa Union peacekeepers to Burundi might suffer a major setback following the re-election of the troubled country to the African Union’s Peace and Security Council.

The AU had sought to deploy 5,000 peacekeepers in the central African state, where hundreds have died in the worst violence since an ethnically charged civil war ended in 2005.

But President Pierre Nkurunziza – who triggered the crisis by standing for a third term in July elections – has rejected the plan, saying the arrival of any such force would be seen as an invasion.

Burundi kept its place on the 15-member council unopposed on Thursday due to a lack of rival contenders from its region.

“There wasn’t any other choice but to rubber-stamp Burundi’s entry,” said one diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Countries on the council are barred from voting on motions about their own affairs. However, diplomats said Burundi could still use its prominent position to influence debates.

African Union leaders are expected to try to persuade President Nkurunziza to accept the force during the AU summit this weekend. Diplomats said they were not optimistic that he would change tack.

Nkurunziza won the July election that was boycotted by most of the opposition. Opponents said a third term violated the constitution. Loyalists cited a court that said he could run.

More than 400 people have been killed in protests and crack-downs over the past nine months, raising worries of a return to the kind of conflict that pitted Burundi’s Tutsi minority against the Hutu majority in the civil war.

The renewed violence has rattled a region where memories of the 1994 genocide in neighbouring Rwanda are still raw. Burundi and Rwanda share the same ethnic mix.

Amnesty International said on Friday that satellite images showed five possible mass graves in Burundi.

US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, said yesterday that perpetrators of atrocities in Burundi ‘must realize that the international community is watching’ and those responsible will be brought to account.

“If the government of Burundi wants to prevent more mass graves, there has to be a prompt inclusive political dialogue outside Burundi and a significantly expanded international presence to offer protection inside,” she said.

Power visited Burundi last week with the UN Security Council.

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