African press review 21 December 2016

The DRC is in the news today, as well as education reforms in Kenya and upcoming strikes in Nigeria.

South Africa’s Mail and Guardian leads with a report saying that South Africans who want to travel to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) will not be able to get visas from the country’s Pretoria embassy until next year.

Citizens from that country who currently live in South Africa and who need new passports will also have to wait.

DRC ambassador to South Africa, Bene M’Poko, said on Tuesday he had closed the embassy until January 4 because he feared for the safety of his staff, after protests in front of the embassy turned violent.

“I closed the embassy because I know what they are planning and I’m a major target. They said they are planning to do what happened in Turkey,” he said.

The Russian ambassador in Ankara was assassinated by a police officer on Monday.

SA universities

The paper also puts a big focus on the future of universities in SA, with the headline: "To survive, South Africa's universities must learn to engage with chaos".

South Africa's academic community has a long way to go in being able to listen and engage with others who have different views to their own, according to the article.

A recent meeting of the University of Cape Town’s Convocation – the annual gathering of its alumni – was "a microcosm of South African higher education in 2015 and 2016" it reports.

The meeting revealed how hard universities must work in the coming years to encourage dissent and debate; and how important it is for academics and other members of university communities to step out of their comfort zones and listen to views with which they bitterly disagree. Now, more than ever, it concludes universities must embrace or "engage the chaos" that has become their new reality.

Education in Kenya

This echoes an article in Kenya’s Daily Nation. It says that the government’s directive to stop a Sh2 billion civic education programme funded by the United States Agency for International Development is ill-advised.

Coming after President Uhuru Kenyatta’s censure of foreign donors’ support for elections, it smacks of intolerance and reminds one of those dark days of single-party dictatorship when the administration reacted ruthlessly towards any person or group it felt threatened its survival.

10 Western envoys responded fiercely at the suggestion that their civic education programmes were aimed at influencing election outcomes.

The foreign missions, including the US, were categorical that they do not support any group to influence election outcomes, and respect the sovereignty of the countries with whom they interact.

Civic education programmes have been part of preparations for every election. The objective is to empower voters to make informed choices as they exercise their democratic right.

Underlying this is the view that lack of information disenfranchises citizens as they easily get manipulated to vote. Therefore, the article says, it is a pity that the current administration construes civic education to mean influencing the outcome of elections.

Strikes in Nigeria

Nigeria’s Vanguard reports on a series of strikes.

Youths in Niger State took to major streets of Minna, the state capital, to protest incessant power outages, claiming the state has for over two years been in darkness.

The protesters also stormed the regional office of the Abuja Electricity Development Company in Minna, and the state House of Assembly. Some 5,000 protesters brandished placards with inscriptions such as "AEDC must go", "No light in Minna", "Bring back our light" and "We say no to darkness".

They warned that further outage, especially between now and January 2017, would not be tolerated.

This article is followed by another about an upcoming strike, forecast for Labour Day.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has threatened a nationwide strike on May 1st 2017, if the Federal Government doesn't begin implementation of its planned N56,000 new national minimum wage, or set up a committee to that effect.