african countries 24

Malawi’s President Peter Mutharika began his second five-year term with a tough stance against corruption and pledged to revive the economy, following accusations of corruption and mismanagement.

Speaking at his inauguration on Friday in Blantyre, Malawi’s second largest city, Mutharika warned that he would not spare anyone found abusing their positions, in an apparent response to allegations of corruption that marked his first term.

“The honeymoon is over. If you belong to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), you have no right to think that you are above the law or to be defiant to your superiors in the name of the party,” he said before thousands of cheering supporters and military parades at Kamuzu stadium.

“We will count it as indiscipline and we will fire you.”

The opposition parties have said Mutharika has nurtured graft, but he denies that. He has said local media reports he benefited from a $4 million contract to supply food to the police force were a ploy to smear him before the elections.

“We want a corrupt-free Malawi where our public resources continue to build roads, community technical colleges and buy drugs for the people,” he added.

Mutharika won the election with a 38.57% share of the vote, with opposition party leader Lazarus Chakwera scoring 35.41% and Deputy President Saulos Chilima claiming 20.24% in the final tally.

Mutharika said his government would push a law that will ensure that 60% of government procurement goes to local companies and also offer tax breaks to the private sector.

He also pledged to offer soft loans to smallholder farmers as well as continue to make the price of fertilizer and seed cheap, signalling a continuation of subsidies that boosted food production during most of his first term.

The president’s inauguration speech has, however, been overshadowed by a declaration by his main rival, Chakwera, that he has rejected results of the May 21 election announced by the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC).

Making his own parallel address in Lilongwe, the administrative capital, Chakwera said he is in the process of filing fresh petitions to the High Court asking it to nullify the results.

“I reject MEC’s fraudulent presidential results. This election has laid bare the corruption that has contaminated all our governance institutions,” he said.

Results had been due at the weekend, but had to be delayed after a court on Saturday granted the opposition an injunction after the electoral commission received 147 complaints of irregularities, including results sheets with sections blotted out or altered with correction fluid.

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One of the country’s biggest poultry producing companies, Astral Food, says it has lost about R100 million due to water shortages experienced in the Lekwa Municipality in Standerton in Mpumalanga.

The company has employed over 3 000 residents of that area.

Astral Foods Managing Director, Andy Crocker, says they have now been forced to reduce working hours and also apply the no work no pay rule.

He says if the situation continues, they will be forced to shed jobs.

“The Goldie abattoir that we have in Standerton produces largest in terms of South Africa. It slaughters 2 million birds a week. 2425 people work there in the processing plant and 900 people on the agricultural side who raised the chicken to deliver to the process in plant.”

“The impact to those people currently is that we are working half time because there is no sufficient water to be able to do the second shift. Obviously we need water to adjacent production if it calls for that,” says Crocker.

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The United States’ actions on Taiwan and the South China Sea are hardly conducive to maintaining stability in the region, a senior Chinese military official said on Saturday, responding to comments by acting US Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan.

“He (Shanahan) has been expressing inaccurate views and repeating old tunes about the issues of Taiwan and the South China Sea,” Shao Yuanming, a senior official of the People’s Liberation Army, told reporters after Shanahan’s speech.

“This is harming regional peace and stability.”

Shao added that China would defend its sovereignty at any cost should anyone try to separate Taiwan from its territory. It views the self-ruled island as a wayward province and has not ruled out the use of force to return it to the fold.

“China will have to be reunified,” Shao said. “If anybody wants to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military will protect the country’s sovereignty at all costs.”

China translates the Chinese word “tong yi” as “reunification”, but it can also be translated as “unification”, a term in English preferred by Taiwan independence supporters who say the Communist government has never ruled the island, so it cannot be “reunified”.

Earlier, Shanahan told delegates at a defence forum in Singapore that the United States would no longer “tiptoe” around Chinese behaviour in Asia, with stability in the region at threat on issues ranging from the South China Sea to Taiwan.

Shanahan did not directly name China when he spoke of “actors” destabilizing the region, but went on to say the United States would not ignore Chinese behaviour.

However, Shao responded by saying it was the United States that was destabilizing the region with its recent actions.

In May, a US warship sailed near the disputed Scarborough Shoal claimed by China in the South China Sea, angering Beijing at a time of tension over trade between the world’s two biggest economies.

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Malawi‘s opposition leader Lazarus Chakwera on Friday rejected the result of last week’s presidential election, saying he had launched a court battle to have the vote annulled on the grounds of fraud.

Chakwera lost the election by just 159,000 votes to incumbent president Peter Mutharika, who was hurriedly sworn into office just a day after the delayed result was issued on Monday.

“I reject the Malawi Electoral Commission’s fraudulent presidential results,” Chakwera said in a statement, adding that he was filing a high court petition to have the election declared void.

“What we have witnessed in front of our very eyes is not an election, but daylight robbery, a crime against our decency as a people and our democracy as a nation,” he said.

Chakwera’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP) last weekend had won a brief court injunction to halt the release of the results, claiming “very glaring irregularities”.

The party said that results sheets were covered in correction fluid and some sheets from polling stations far apart had the same handwriting.

The injunction was lifted on Monday and Mutharika was declared the winner hours later.

At his swearing-in on Tuesday, Mutharika urged opposition parties to accept the outcome, saying “they have to accept that there can only be one winner.”

Mutharika, of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the ballot with 38.57% of the vote, against Chakwera on 35.41%.

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US stock futures slid and sovereign bonds surged on Friday as investors feared President Donald Trump’s shock move to slap tariffs on Mexico risked tipping the United States, and maybe the whole world, into recession.

The outlook darkened further when a key measure of Chinese manufacturing activity disappointed for May, questioning the effectiveness of Beijing’s stimulus steps.

Markets moved aggressively to price in deeper rate cuts by the Federal Reserve this year, while bond yields touched fresh lows and curves inverted in a warning of recession.

Washington will impose a 5% tariff from June 10, which would then rise steadily to 25% until illegal immigration across the southern border was stopped.

Trump announced the decision on Twitter late Thursday, catching markets completely by surprise and sparking a rush to safe harbours.

“The threat of US tariffs on Mexico to take effect inside two weeks is a sharp blow to investor sentiment,” said Sean Callow, a senior FX analyst at Westpac.

“Mexico is the US’s largest trading partner and a flare-up in trade tensions was definitely not on the market radar,” he added. “This is obviously a major setback for CAD, MXN and the thousands of US businesses that use Mexican-made products.”

Yields on the 10-year Treasury note quickly fell to a fresh 20-month low of 2.18%, while the dollar jumped 1.7%on the Mexican peso. E-Mini futures for the S&P 500slipped 0.7% and FTSE futures 0.4%.

Asian shares slid at first but soon drew month-end bargain hunting having suffered a torrid few weeks. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan edged up 0.3%, though it was still down 7.3% for the month.

China’s blue chip index added 0.7%, partly on talk Beijing would now have to ramp up its stimulus measures.

Japan’s Nikkei pared early losses to be off 0.6%, but was still down 6.5% for the month so far.

Investors clearly feared that opening a new front in the trade wars would threaten global and U.S. growth, and pressure central banks everywhere to consider new stimulus.

On Thursday, Federal Reserve Board of Governors Vice Chair Richard Clarida had said the central bank would act if inflation stays too low or global and financial risks endanger the economic outlook.

“What the Clarida’s comments have done is clarify in many people’s minds the answer to the questions of whether low inflation proving more than transitory would itself be enough to get the Fed to ease — the answer appears to be ‘yes’,” said Ray Attrill, head of FX strategy at National Australia Bank.

“That served to reinforce prevailing market expectations that the Fed will be easing in the second half of this year.”

Indeed, the case that the inflation slowdown was temporary took a blow when the core personal consumption expenditures index, the Fed’s favoured measure of inflation, was revised down to 1% for the first quarter, from 1.3%.

Trump’s tariff threat only added to the dangers and the market further narrowed the odds on Fed easing this year and next. Futures imply 44 basis points of cuts by year end in the current effective funds rate of 2.38%.

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Democratic White House hopeful Elizabeth Warren said Thursday that if Donald Trump were not protected by his presidential status, he would be “in handcuffs and indicted” for obstructing the investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference.

The progressive US senator from Massachusetts, one of the leading Democrats for the party’s 2020 nomination, was the first presidential candidate to speak out in favor of launching impeachment proceedings against Trump.

“If he were anyone other than president of the United States, he would be in handcuffs and indicted,” Warren said on ABC talk show “The View.”

Warren had called for an impeachment inquiry the day after the April 18 publication of special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report on Moscow’s election interference.

Following a nearly two-year probe, Mueller concluded in his report that there was no evidence of outright collusion between Trump and Moscow.

He also said that, having detailed at least 10 possible acts of obstruction by Trump, it was not possible to say the president committed no crime.

This week, the special counsel said he was bound by the longstanding policy that a sitting president cannot be charged with a crime.

“Mueller… says, basically, by the time you get to the end of the report, there are all the facts, multiple examples, of obstruction of justice, I can’t indict, it’s up to Congress,” Warren said.

Democrats hold a majority in the House of Representatives and are therefore able to launch an impeachment inquiry. But even if the House impeaches Trump, the effort to oust him is likely to fail in the Republican-led Senate.

While several other Democratic presidential hopefuls are also calling for impeachment proceedings, House leaders remain reluctant to begin the process during the 2020 election campaign.

They argue it could prove very unpopular with voters, and its ultimate failure would galvanize Trump’s core supporters and fuel his narrative that he is a victim of a system that wants him ousted.

Instead, Democratic leaders are urging rank-and-file members to allow ongoing congressional investigations of Trump to run their course.

Trump meanwhile repeated his claim that the report offered him total exoneration, and that he has been the victim of “giant presidential harassment.”

After a rare public statement by Mueller the previous day, Trump on Thursday swatted away the Democrats’ threat of impeachment.

“I don’t see how they can,” he said.

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The United Nations Security Council has extended its sanctions regime, including an arms embargo on South Sudan for one year but without the consensus of the entire 15-member body.

All three African states joined by Russia and China abstained on the draft resolution allowing its passage with 10 members in favour of maintaining the arms embargo.

South Africa criticised the sanctions on the war-torn country, arguing they were not helpful to the current complex political process led by the regional Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD).

The US-drafted resolution garnered 10 votes in favour, surpassing the 9-vote threshold for resolutions in the absence of any vetoes. It renews the arms embargo until 31 May 2020 in addition to assets freezes and travel restrictions on eight nationals over their roles in fueling the conflict.

US Envoy Jonathan Cohen criticised the African states in the Council saying, “We are disappointed that this resolution did not receive support from the three African members of the Security Council. Just three months ago, this Council passed a resolution to “Silence the Guns in Africa” with strong AU support.  Today, we regret that these abstentions show an unwillingness to stop the flow of weapons to one of the continent’s deadliest civil conflicts.  The measures renewed in this resolution are designed to protect civilians and reduce violence in a country that has borne witness to unspeakable atrocities.”

South Africa called for the international community to support the IGAD process and lamented what it saw as undue external pressure from the international community.

“South Africa is of the firm view that sanctions should be seen as a tool to encourage continued cooperation and progress to the political process and not as a punitive measure. Furthermore, sanctions should be a used as an incentive to create stability and build an environment that is conducive to finding political agreement in support of lasting and durable peace,” says SA Ambassador Jerry Matjila.

Meanwhile, since the latest peace agreement signed in September last year, President Salva Kiir agreed to again set up a government of national unity with opposition leader Riek Machar, but the implementation of that agreement has been delayed for six months.

“When there is a volatile political process on the table, it should be safeguarded and exempt from external pressures which could aggravate the situation. Nevertheless, the process of making peace has never been, nor will it ever be an easy task as it is not a linear process but it has many layers to it.  Lastly, like many delegations, we remain concerned with the precarious humanitarian situation that still prevails in South Sudan. We call on all parties to redouble their efforts towards improving the humanitarian situation and to protect all those in vulnerable situations.”

The United States indicated it remained ready to consider adjustments to the sanctions regime in light of progress or a lack thereof in South Sudan.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch called the renewal “the right step towards ending illegal attacks on men, women and children in a war where civilians have been the main victims of the violence.”

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