AP:

“In some parts of the country, the food situation is as bad as many of our volunteers and staff have ever seen it,” said Emma Kundishora, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Red Cross Society.

Erratic rain — too much in some areas and too little in others — has damaged crops of corn, the staple food across the southern African nation. The former regional breadbasket also has been hit by acute shortages of seed and fertilizer.

At least 4 million Zimbabweans are estimated to have fled the nation’s economic meltdown in recent years to find work in neighboring countries and further afield, leaving the population at about 8 million, according to official estimates from the finance ministry.

The Red Cross expressed particular concern about the possible impact of existing and looming food shortages on people living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

“Hunger is an especially brutal experience for these people,” Kundishora said, describing people interrupting AIDS medication because the drugs are too toxic without food.

“Once people do this, their situation deteriorates incredibly quickly,” she said.

In December 2009, the Red Cross extended emergency food operation in Zimbabwe until October 2010, calling on donors for $33.2 million in extra funding. The agency faces a shortfall in funding of about $23.9 million, Thursday’s statement said.

“Right now, the situation is already critical — more than 2 million people need direct humanitarian support,” said Dr. Stephen Omollo, the IFRC representative in Zimbabwe. “And we know that this will get worse as the upcoming harvest already appears to have failed.”

CNN has a helpful “Explainer” piece exploring the motivation behind the chaos and the Nigerian government’s response.

AllAfrica.com reports that acting president Goodluck Jonathan has appointed a new National Security Adviser, but sources claim it is not related to the recent violence.

SOS Children’s Village has the background:

Pregnant women, breast-feeding mums and children under five will no longer have to pay for health care in Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone has the world’s highest child mortality rate. For every 100,000 live births in the west African nation, as many as 1,800 women die, according to UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). And every year another half a million pregnant women die each year because they can’t access healthcare. Others have been imprisoned in clinics, because they cannot pay doctors’ fees.The country’ s president announced in November that it is set to scrap maternal and child health user fees on Independence Day, April 27. But in a country with only about 170 doctors for more than five million people, minimal medical supplies and a health service recovering from 11 years of civil war, making the free service work will be a huge job. Getting rid of fees is a start, but critics are asking whether this really will be a cure-all for the country’s mums and children.

Health centres are few and far between in Sierra Leone, often far away from remote and poor communities. Besides user fees, poor people face other barriers to maternal healthcare such as transport costs and cost of being away from work. Fast decision making, better transport and quick treatment are more important in saving lives than free health care said a gynaecologist in the capital, Freetown. “At times, the husband – who has to decide – is not there,” he told United Nations news service, IRIN. “Or maybe the mother will say: ‘No, let’s wait. Or maybe there is an old woman in the community who will say: ‘Wait, wait, wait’ until it is too late.”Traffic delays and frequent delays at clinics can also be the difference between life and death. “The patient… gets to the facility – no doctor, no nurse, no medicine, no blood and the patient has to wait until a doctor is called on duty.”

Josh Kron of the New York Times reports:

Three landslides sent mounds of earth hurtling toward villages in the district of Bududa along the slopes of Mount Elgon near the Kenyan border, destroying houses and other buildings.

The local community council said that 320 people were missing, government relief officials said, and so the death toll was expected to rise.

“Many are missing,” said Musa Ecweru, a state minister for natural disasters, who was in Bududa. “Members of local government are dead. A rich businessman was killed. Members of my own family are missing.”

Most of the buildings that were destroyed were mud-grass huts, Mr. Ecweru said, but a medical clinic constructed with cement also collapsed.

South Africans proudly declared themselves nearly ready Tuesday, 100 days before they host football’s World Cup.

Tournament organizers have been repeatedly and sometimes sharply questioned about whether a country with high rates of poverty and crime was capable of hosting football’s premier event.

At the 100-days ceremony in Durban, one of nine host cities, the mood was celebratory and determined. Elsewhere across the country, South Africans performed a dance based on football moves and sang the national anthem, stressing that hosting the tournament requires enthusiasm and national unity.

“As South Africans we have encountered a lot of skepticism but today, as we celebrate this milestone, we can confidently say to the world that we will be ready,” Danny Jordaan, head of the South African organizing committee, said in Durban.

Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said the “brick and mortar” work was finished, and now it was up to all South Africans to prepare to be good hosts.

He cites Rwanda as an example:

Rwanda, for instance, is landlocked, and depends on its neighboring countries for ports and transport to the sea to market any surplus agriculture production. And it is a small country, unable to deploy economies of scale in purchasing supplies such as fertilizer and seed. President Kagame and Agriculture Minister Agnes Kalibata have stressed that Rwanda’s success in improving agriculture production will be limited with regional success.

Rwanda agriculture will only flourish if regional markets flourish, and regional transportation, regional communication, regional infrastructure.

The goal of the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, also called Feeding the Future, is to create the conditions for Africa’s farmers to grow enough food to feed their families and also have surpluses to sell on the markets. If there aren’t sufficient markets to absorb the surpluses, prices of the commodities fall and farmers lose incentive to grow as much as they can. It has happened over and over again in Africa and has kept African agriculture from advancing.

Thus, Boaz notes, “surplus production is a regional aspect. You produce a surplus in your country, you need a region to sell it in.”

Read the whole piece here.

Key line:

Nigeria, at this point, needs a strong and effective leader to ensure the stability of the country and to manage Nigeria’s many political, economic, and security challenges. So we are in – we have been focused on this issue ever since President Yar’Adua was stricken ill, and we have tremendous concern about stability. And our message to all of the players in Nigeria is make sure that this moves forward in a stable, constitutional, and democratic way.

Now, the Washington Post and other news agencies report that these same Somali Islamists have banned the UN food altogether:

Trucks carrying food aid have not been allowed to pass through a checkpoint in the Afgooye corridor near the capital of Mogadishu for the past two weeks, WFP spokesman Peter Smerdon said.

Afgooye has the largest concentration of displaced people in the country. It is nominally controlled by the insurgent group Hizbul Islam but allied Islamist group al-Shabab also operates roadblocks there. On Sunday, al-Shabab prohibited WFP from distributing food in areas under its control because it says the food undercuts farmers selling recently harvested crops.

“Somali farmers are having a hard time selling their produce because WFP distributes food aid across the regions and that is demoralizing,” an al-Shabab statement said. “The organization has been completely banned.”

This development comes amidst reports of growing tensions between the US and the UN over aid restrictions.

According to the Washington Post:

The trip is also the first by a French leader since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. It aims to cement diplomatic ties that were restored in November, three years after they broke down because of the arrest warrants that accused those close to Kagame of a role in the presidential assassination that sparked the genocide.

Sarkozy was met at Kigali’s airport by Rwanda’s prime minister and then visited the main genocide museum in the tiny, mountainous central African country. Afterward Kagame welcomed Sarkozy at his official residence.

France and Rwanda have sparred for years over an alleged French role in the genocide, in which 500,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis but also moderate Hutus, were massacred in frenzied killing led by radical Hutus.

CNN’s Paul Armstrong has a good rundown of some of the remaining questions in light of this recent turn of events:

Why did President Yar’Adua leave Nigeria?

Yar’Adua went to Saudia Arabia in November to be treated for inflammation of tissue around the heart, a condition that was diagnosed after he complained of chest pain.

Yar’Adua, 58, said at the time he did not intend to resign while in Saudi Arabia, but no further news came from the president for almost two months until January 13, when he gave the BBC an interview from his hospital bed.

In a frail voice, he sought to assure his countrymen that he was getting better and intended to return soon to power.

What was the reaction in Nigeria?

Until Jonathan’s appointment, Africa’s most populous nation had been on the brink of a constitutional crisis that threatened to bring the country to a standstill at a time when it is facing a number of challenges, not least the insurgency in its oil rich Niger Delta region.

Some observers said Yar’Adua’s absence created a power vacuum, while demonstrators took to the streets of the nation’s capital, Abuja, to demand a constitutional order on his absence and evidence about his true state of health.

Nobel Prize winner for literature, Wole Soyinka, even accused the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) of taking advantage of the president’s absence. “The issue is that certain elements within the ruling party love this hiatus, they love the headlessness of government because they can proceed to loot and create their own little empires while the president is away,” he said.

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